Do cats make sense? Cat Sense John Bradshaw (Basic Books, New York, NY; 2013) ISBN: 0465031013

For far too long, the behaviour of our pets has been seen (at best) as unconstrained by comprehensible evolutionary processes, or (at worst) entirely constructed by anthropomorphism. John Bradshaw’s Cat Sense is a welcome attempt to challenge this status quo by demonstrating that science can help us understand why domestic cats do what they do, and how they inveigled their way into our homes. Compared to their rival, the dog, however, we know very little about our cat guests, a fact that permeates through this book loud and clear. Our understanding of the domestication of dogs has progressed rapidly in recent years [1,2], mainly due to genetic discoveries and good experimental paradigms to test their cognition. Cat Sense, therefore, should be seen not only as an interesting read, but also as a call to arms for scientists interested in how domestication has (and has not) shaped the cat. The first three chapters of the book take us through the history of cat domestication, which is a trifle bewildering. Bradshaw explains that there were likely several domestication events in several locations, and there is still considerable gene flow between domestic cats and closely related wild species. Thus, it is not at all clear what happened and why. A few take-home messages. First, the author does not consider cats to be fully domesticated. Here, I guess what the author means is that domestication has not shaped cats to be as useful as other domestic animals. I don’t think this comes as much of a surprise to anyone who has met a cat before, and makes sense given that cat domestication was probably a combination of active selection by humans plus self-domestication from the cat. In other words, cats may have been tolerated rather than welcomed. S h h d ( u t a c i t n p u m h a