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this point. Thomas's (1996) history of animals in British society demonstrates that a
number of species have moved from inside to outside of the domestic economy, and
have been variously treated with affection and disgust. In seventeenth-century
England, for example, bees were allegedly treated as if they were a part of the human
community. 'Bees would hate you, said an authority, if you did not love them'
(Thomas 1996:96), but what Thomas refers to as the 'Eastern' view of dogs as filthy
scavengers was still current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 'In 1662, the
preacher Thomas Brooks classified dogs with vermin,' and, jumping a few centuries,
Freud also saw dogs as reprehensible because they had no horror of excrement and
no shame about their sexual functions (Thomas 1996:105-106). Thomas's historical
survey and cross-cultural comparisons demonstrate that there is nothing necessary
or immutable in people's responses to the wildness of animals. Their inclusion or
exclusion, whether or not they are treated with affection or disgust, depends on
their placing within a particular cosmology.
Clearly, animal categorisations do have particular cultural and historical contexts,
but they can also be rather slippery. Animals may resist categorisation. Pet cats in
modern Western societies are interesting in this regard because it is generally
accepted that they will retain some of their wildness. The designation 'pet' generally
indicates belonging: a placing in the home, either sharing space with people,
adorning the carpet or sleeping on the settee, or confinement within domestic space
as in the case of goldfish, lizards or budgerigars. In the case of dogs, moving beyond
the confines of the home is usually under the control of a human. However,
'putting the cat out at night' signals incomplete containment in the home, only a
partial domestication, even though cats may be cosmetically modified to fit
conceptions of the homely and domestic. Similarly, the cat-flap is a breach in the
domestic boundary, and cats bringing mice or birds into the home may still be seen
as polluters of domestic space. In this respect, pet cats are transgressive, breaking the
boundary between nature and culture.
Feral cats occupy a zone somewhere else on the domestic—wild spectrum. As
members of the same species as pet cats, either ex-pets, dumped cats or born into a
feral colony, they are all potential pets—they could be 'rescued', as the Cat Action
Trust suggests that they should be—but the feral cat also embodies wildness, more
so than the domestic version. Some ferals may live in close proximity to humans,
even occasionally occupying domestic space, whereas other feral groups live entirely
apart from people while depending on resources generated by human settlement
such as vermin, scrap food, buildings and waste materials (the latter two providing
shelter). Perceptions of these feral animals then overlap with those of the Wild Cat
(Felinus sylvestris)
from which the domestic cat
(Felinus
catus)
is descended. Thus, the
pet/feral/wild boundaries are blurred.
'The wild': cats on the margin
In overdeveloped societies, cats as wild animals also have a place on the fringes of
civilisation, as a real or imagined and occasional threat to the settled population, and
