Felis Imperator

By T.E. Kalem

THE CAT

by MURIEL BEADLE 251 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.

They were gods in Egypt. Some two millenniums before the birth of Christ, cats were buried with the pomp of pharaohs, hi bronze coffins and mausoleums complete with mummified mice for delectation hi the afterlife. A drastic decline from this lordly state occurred when the early Christian church decided that the feline was a pagan minion of Satan intimately connected to wicked deeds of darkness. In pictures of the Last Supper, for example, the "bad cat" of Christendom sits at Judas' feet.

Tracing the radical fluctuations of feline popularity over the centuries is only one of the innumerable delights that Author Muriel Beadle brings to her consistently fascinating book. Throughout, The Cat purrs with literary amusement and the kind of rousing curiosity that allegedly led its subject to a bad end and this book to a happy one.

Mrs. Beadle confirms some cat lore and usefully corrects certain misconceptions. Every cat owner knows cats can speak volumes--especially at night on back fences. Few would guess that in human terms this vocalization works out to nine consonants, five vowel sounds, two diphthongs and an umlaut (as in the German ueber).

Everyone knows the cat has a libidinous reputation. Phrases like "tomcatting around" and "cat houses" are part of the language. Few may know that cats can copulate eight times in 20 minutes, which helps to account for the 13 million kittens born in the U.S. every year. The final phase of intercourse is quite painful to the female. In the cat family, the release of the eggs for fertilization requires a triggering mechanism. The device is supplied by prickly spines that cover the penis and rake out the female on its withdrawal. A piercing cry invariably and understandably follows. The pregnancy cycle is brisk in tempo. A litter conceived in February is born in April and reared by July, with the mother all ready for another go. It will surprise some readers to find that cats do not kill by instinct and initially do not know that rodents and birds are tasty fare. Hunting is learned behavior. When a cat wanders in with an animal in its mouth, and begins batting it around the living room floor, it is not asking for approval. The cat is simply treating the human family as it does its own offspring. "Here's a goodie!" the cat is saying. "Chase it!" (if it is half-dead). "Taste it!" That is the basic training by which the young cat is taught to kill. It takes remarkable self-discipline for the mother not to finish off and devour the captured creature.

Cats may not possess nine lives, but some could make the Guinness Book of World Records with only one. Tom Cadillac, so christened for his feat, was accidentally shipped in a Cadillac chassis from the U.S. to Australia--a seven-week trip at the time--and was still alive on arrival. He had eaten the engine grease and the car's instruction manual. Chat Beau, a four-year-old male, found his human family in Texarkana,

Texas, after their move from Lafayette, La. The distance he covered was almost 300 miles, and it took him four months to get there. The most fecund female on record was a Texas cat named Dusty, who gave birth to her 420th kitten in 1952 at the age of 17. By the popular and extremely rough rule of thumb that one year of a cat's life equals seven of a human's, that would make Dusty 119.

In human annals such a feat would be beyond belief. In Muriel Beadle's richly informative volume, it is only one of many tails well told.

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