firecat

Media Consumption for February 1–7

My annual-or-so stab at doing a meme adjacent to Reading Wednesday. Maybe I can keep it up this year.
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The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa by Jonathan B. Losos

Cribbed from my review on Audible.

A delight for cat lovers of all stripes

Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary biologist. His primary research is on lizards but he spends a lot of time keeping up with cat science too, and teaches a college class on cat science. He reads the Audible version of the book and I found him easy to listen to.

Although the book is loosely strung together with the theme of evolution, the author ranges into a number of other subjects too, particularly the state of general scientific knowledge about cats (there are far too few studies, he complains), how new breeds of cats are developed and recognized, and ethical issues involving cats (indoor vs outdoor, wildlife vs feral cats, creation of breeds that vary a lot from the general traits of cats, such as the Munchkin, which has very short legs.

Anyway, I absolutely loved most of this book. It had just the right balance for me of “yeah I knew that” / "yeah I thought so" and “huh, I didn’t know that.” Losos does a great job of explaining scientific concepts so that they would be easy for non-scientists to understand. He is delightfully enthusiastic about his subject matter. The wide variety of material is organized well. I really liked the way he explained the need for certain research, described the research methods abstractly, and then included fun anecdotes about how particular studies actually went. (The parts about studying cats outdoors using GPS collars and cat cams were particularly enjoyable.) I especially learned a lot in the section about creating new breeds of cat, and found out I had some misunderstandings about domestic cat–wild cat hybrid breeds. I'm glad to know more and I feel a little less uncomfortable about them now than I did before.

There were a couple of things I didn't love as much. Losos has a habit of describing two sides of an ethical conflict and placing himself smack in the middle of the two camps with a smug "of course, I'm right" attitude. I also didn't like his enthusiasm for the idea of creating saber-toothed cats using CRISPR! Ew! But that's not a complaint about the quality of the book.