Our first winter upstate, we hear a shifting and settling inside the wall. We know it is real—an animal—because our cat Toby goes and stands by that stretch of baseboard. At first, it is easy enough to imagine that the being behind it is a friend, a little thing escaping the cascading snow outside. In the living room, it keeps us distant company while we watch The Sopranos. We know that we should probably do something, but we think that it will leave when it is ready.
We go on thinking this, and Toby goes on staring at the wall, and our other cat Gus goes on ignoring the situation entirely. Until one afternoon, just after sunset, we hear new sounds from behind the sheetrock. This time, they are tiny and awful, a cacophony of squeaks and whines. I walk to the basement door. I open it; I stand on the stairs; I listen to a chorus of stirring and thrashing, a temporary increase in volume, and then the end of those shrill mewls. I realize, suddenly, that the creatures behind the walls are not friends—they’re cannibals.
Finally, we call pest control.
I think the point of cats is their pointlessness, but on the other hand, this is actually technically supposed to be the point, the driving force behind the whole history of domestication: rodent control. As the story would have it, cats, like dogs and every other domestic animal, conferred a specific benefit to humans that we harnessed. Jonathan Losos details the historical and genetic evidence: ten thousand years ago, wildcats prowled the forests of Europe and Asia and the savannas of Africa. At first, these creatures were “commensals” like cockroaches and rats, taking advantage of the detritus of human communities.
But cats diverged from infamous pests, theoretically becoming welcome near human communities because their presence kept rodent populations down. From there, natural selection took the reins in North Africa. Cats who were friendlier controlled rodents first at the peripheries of human communities, and then their centers. Generation after generation, they got closer and braver and kinder. This history is evident in Egyptian art, which depicts cats hunting rats, birds, and snakes.
But research suggests that cats are not actually great at hunting—not good workers. Studies from 1940s England to twentieth-century Baltimore and Brooklyn have found that cats are not effective at keeping rat populations down. Besides, as Carlos Driscoll argues, there are other creatures better suited to the task. In ancient Rome, ferrets had already been trained to hunt. Why, then, would the Romans want cats? This leads him to say that “cats domesticated themselves,” wheedling their way into our homes because they saw the benefit.
I love the idea that cats have always been bad at their jobs: the slackers of the so-called domestic animals, they are predisposed toward time theft. Whatever cats do, it is not for us.
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Illustrated by Lara Schaberg
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Excerpted from Cat by Rebecca van Laer, © Rebecca van Laer, 2025. Published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.
