(A Contribution to the Animan question)

If an essential capitalist feature is the commodification and industrialisation of everything, that applies to non-human animals as well as humans. Slaughterhouse horrors on the one hand, videos of cute puppies and kittens on the other - both effects of human domination over non-human nature.

Working cat

The domestication of cats probably goes back to about 7,000 B.C.: "for most of their history, domestic cats have had to earn their keep as controllers of mice and rats." (John Bradshaw, J.B. in the rest of the text) Ancient Egypt even deified cats (which by no means implies they were well treated: hundreds of thousands of animals, up to millions perhaps, were killed as offerings to gods). In a more mundane way, in the 19th century, 180,000 mommies of cats and various animals were exported to Europe as fertilisers: £ 3 13s 9d per ton.

Despite "a weakness in social skills [which] is perhaps the greatest difference between cats and dogs" (J.B.), cats can perform  work that suits their "natural" abilities. They have jobs, mainly pest control and "emotional support". A "working cat" (also called a "mouser") is a feral cat that is sheltered and fed, in exchange for its innate occupation. The resident cat at 10 Downing Street, London, has been given the title of "Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office".

"Working class cats" can be hired.

"Working cat is a program developed to save [cats'] lives while providing free, eco-friendly round-the-clock pest control for homes and businesses. [..] A Working cat 'put to work' in homes and businesses can provide years of service with minimal care. [..] Working cat adoptions are  5 dollars per cat, which covers the cost of their chip registration."

"Contrary to popular myth, cats can be trained, but few people bother." (J.B.)

True, but some people make the most of feline agility. A number of circuses have actor-cats. In the Moscow Cat Theater, they ride bikes, walk on a wire, perform acrobatics and aerial acts. "The salary we offer our cats is [..] delicious food and comfortable old age", the director says. The Amazing Acro-Cats has a cast of domestic cats and a few other small animals, and was founded by animal trainer Samantha Martin "to keep her show cats mentally sharp in between television, film, and advertising jobs". One of the highlights of the Big Apple Circus is the Savitsky Cats, who slalom through ladders, jump through hoops...

Other cats appear on the screen, some of them rise to fame and receive PATSY Awards, the animal equivalent of an Oscar (star Orangey (1950-1967) won two), but animal defenders point out that like other performing animals, circus and movie cats are kept in cages and often abused.

Scapegoat cats

Historians dispute the belief that there was widespread demonisation and mass killing of cats (especially black ones, associated with evil) in the Middle Ages.

Social conflict can be deviated, though.

In the 1730s, mistreated printing apprentices in Paris who were poorly fed compared to the house cat, killed her and every other cat they could find. "The cat massacre served as an oblique attack on the master and his wife. [..] the killing of the cats expressed a hatred of the bourgeois." (Robert Darnton)

Cat & class breeding

Dogs as we know them result from long historical manipulations, but the 19th century went further by applying scientific principles to the process of classifying, standardising and differentiating them. The Victorian era turned cats and dogs into commodities and objects. Modern pet keeping generated a commercial opportunity on a soon-to-be world market. Specialised magazines provided breeders and buyers with ads and advice. What litter to choose, how to run for competitions, present your candidate, win prizes, earn money...

...by keeping the classy ones and getting rid of the rabble. Not unlike a farmer picking the best stock in selective breeding, Mrs Ledeboer wrote to Our Cat Magazine: "I do not like to kill all the new-born kits, but what can we do with all the ugly common cats ?" In 1890, the National Cat Club's Stud Book & Register expressed "a very Victorian impulse to sift, sort, rank and label" (Kathryn Hughes, K.H. in the rest of the text) This feline Almanach de Gotha nobility reference book combined aristocratic snobbery with bourgeois acumen: to be sold at a profit, commodities must be up to standard, measurable as well as original. Frances Simpson, well-known breeder and cat-writer, author of a management advice book, Cats for Pleasure & Profit (1889), proved that such a dignified occupation perfectly suited respectable ladies. She left a fortune at her death in 1926. Even royalty engaged in this lucrative business.

Pedigree cat breeders today supply about 15% of pet cats in the U.K. (less than 10% in other countries).

Darwin at the cat show

The 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the first of its kind, housed in Crystal Palace, London, a huge innovative glass and iron building, testified to modern technology and British supremacy. It attracted 6 million people. Marx was a visitor.

Twenty years later, the first nationwide cat show in Britain took place in the same Crystal Palace. Darwin, already famous and controversial for his theories on evolution, was invited to be a patron. The initiator of the event was one of his correspondents, as were two of the "judges" at the show. This time, the attendance was only 20,000.

Darwin suggested establishing a sub-class for white cats, with one or two blue eyes, and asking the owners whether the animals were deaf. He showed an interest in how cats "use their voices much as a means of expression, and [how] they utter, under various emotions and desires, at least six or seven different sounds." (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872, a popular book in its time, originally a chapter of Descent of Man).

Later, another cat show organised according to the social origin of the owners, raised the conundrum of class identity: "Was a clerk a working man ? What about a green-grocer ? What, indeed, about working women ?" (K.H.)

Science was busy cataloguing and grading items and artifacts to establish a hierarchy of species as of races and classes. It was received wisdom that the labouring masses differed physically and psychologically from the middle and upper strata - a view still widely shared in academia about a hundred years ago. In the age of popular eugenics, it was logical to sort out the elite cat from the commoner.

Humanised cats

From the Puss in Boots tales to the Crazy Cat (1972) and Cat Woman films (2004), there is an age-old tradition of cats being attributed human traits, emotions and intentions.

Such systematic anthropomorphism was the life's work of Louis Wain (1860-1939). Kathryn Hughes' biography is less about him than about what made "cat land, a phenomenon that Wain helped make but which also [..] made him. " (K.H.) 

The one-time eminent and prolific cartoonist specialised in images of cats in all sorts of human activities. His drawings display an innocuous satire of social and family life, often with a very explicit conservative bias. Socialism is represented as an octopus, each tentacle a "rabble-rousing activist" (K.H.) calling for blood, advocating the murder of honest citizens. The British Workman. The 8 Hour Movement (1905) shows three idling unpleasant-looking worker-cats. Celebrity never made Wain rich, he was a poor businessman, demands for his pictures declined, he was declared bankrupt, and in 1924 was certified insane. He spent his remaining years on drawing and painting, still focusing (obsessing ?) on cats but developing a more abstract (some say, psychedelic) style.

War cat

An estimated half a million cats "served" on both sides in the 1914-18 trenches, initially brought in to cull rodents, then often adopted as pets by the soldiers. Though unrecorded, the casualty rate must have been high: among other things, unlike quite a few horses, cats were not provided with gas masks.What's more, unpatriotic cats were not averse to crossing the line:

"One day, when the animal arrived back at the French trenches, it had a note in bad French attached to its collar: 'From what region are you ?' The document was passed all the way up the chain of command to the general, who considered it evidence of espionage. The cat was arrested, tried for treason, and shot." (K.H., chapter 37)

In 1922, a Felix the Cat animated film showed an army of cats repelling an attack by cats.

Rebel cat

Kathryn Hughes covers a lot of ground but in no way claims to be exhaustive.

Black cats' image and perception vary throughout the world, and many cultures regard them as a portent of good luck.

"Since the 1880s, the colour black has been associated with anarchism. The black cat, in an alert, fighting stance was later adopted as an anarchist symbol." (International  Workers of the World)

Louis Wain would have disapproved of the black bristly-haired cat on an 1915 I.W.W. poster:

"Beware/Good Pay or Bum Work/One Big Union/ We Never Forget/ SABOTAGE"

The fiery unyielding animal has been broadly adopted as a symbol of anarcho-syndicalism and more generally autonomous direct action, hence its being taken up by "eco-warriors" and other rebels.

Pet & nuisance

19th century Germany classified wild cats "as vermin, due to the harm they supposedly caused to both wildlife reserves and livestock." (J.B.)

Nowadays wildcats are often protected, while feral cats, i.e. "living wild but descending from domestic cats" (J.B.), are sometimes dealt with as a dangerous nuisance to be disposed of.

"The domestic cat is the most popular pet in the world today" (there might be three times as many domestic cats as dogs), it no longer has 'to earn [its] keep as controller of mice and rats", and "the most significant challenge" it faces "is a growing reputation as destroyer of wildlife [..] The conservation lobby, from Australasia to the U.S. and Great Britain, increasingly objects to [cats] maintaining any kind of hunting territory" (J.B.). These "adorable Internet memes [..] are also destroying the environment more efficiently than humans", killing in the U.S."as many as 3.7 billion native birds annually" (Annalee Newitz)

Figures are disputed, yet the situation may well be dramatic. Consequently, taking into account the number of stray and feral cats (25 to 80 million in the U.S., 12 million in Australia), demands for cat regulation are on the rise: maximum number of cats per household, sterilisation, registration, confinement, curfew, no-cat areas, etc. In the U.K., voices call for a specific feline addition to the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (passed by Labour in 1998)...

...which entails some tracking device. Many cats are now microchipped: no more painful than an injection or a blood test, and convenient if the animal gets lost.

When it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs, a Frenchman cried : "Poor dogs ! They want to treat you as human beings !" The reverse could be happening two centuries later: like animal, like human. In a not too remote future, chips might help find missing kids or disoriented seniors, and it won't be long before each of us has an implant as a storage of his N.H.S. records. Criminal records will come next. All in the name of the common good. (Personal disclosure: when I bought stamps today at the Post Office, I was required to give my name, address and phone number.)

As in other ecological issues, environmental good intentions are prone to backfire. In some islands, elimination of predatory cats liberated rats from being preyed upon, and they started decimating the local fauna.

Policing and eliminating are often done in the name of protection. Though we might not have expected one of the oldest and largest welfare charities to be involved in feline killing, in the early 20th century the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals agreed to the extermination of stray cats by gassing or drowning. The R.S.P.C.A. also offered £ 500 to contribute to an "electric cage" to get rid of over-numerous cats (K.H., chapter 35). Saving pets' lives implies culling unrequired or dispensable animals. The most caring animal shelter can neither feed nor find a home for every stray that comes its way, therefore...

Still, there are limits to what public opinion can take. There was an outcry when a profit-seeking company contemplated breeding black cats on a remote island to harvest them for their fur. Modern Western sensibility is a social construct: cats are increasingly treated as family members, the general public (reluctantly) comes to terms with cats being victimised in lab experiments for supposedly beneficial medical research, but nobody wants them to be farmed like minks or foxes.

Clawing our way through

In the 21st century, the companionship between the human species and the rest of nature can no longer be taken for granted, and the ruling classes must, yet cannot, be ecological, because sustainable capitalism is a contradiction in terms. Excess and waste are part and parcel of this social system. Notably, the growth of global intensive meat production is one of the main drivers of climate change, water pollution and biodiversity loss. An estimated 140,000 chicken are killed every minute worldwide, not, as in Ancient Egypt, as a sacrifice to gods, but to fill up supermarket shelves. Not only does the home pussy kill a sparrow he hardly eats, but his owner also buys him meat from an ever-expanding pet food market. Who's to blame ? What's to change ?

The animal issue today is as vital as the social-ecological issue as a whole. The safekeeping of ecosystems depends on ending the commercialisation of life and ending the competition between firms and ending the search for higher profits by ever greater productivity. In fact the animal question partakes of the human question, which in a class society can only be addressed as a class issue (a point often overlooked by animal liberationists). We're not there yet. But to get there, best to know where we stand.

G.D., January 2026

For further reading (and possible viewing)

John Bradshaw, Cat Sense, Penguin, 2014. A truly informative study in "anthrozoology".

Kathryn Hughes, Cat Land. Enchantment & the Making of the Modern World, Fourth Estate, 2024.

Robert Darnton, "Workers Revolt. The Great Cat Massacre in the rue Saint-Séverin", in The Great Cat Massacre & Other Episodes in French Cultural Stories, Perseus, 1984, chapter 2. Readable on the Internet.

On the "invention of the modern dog", see article on victorianweb.org

Working Cat. Providing a GREEN alternative to your pest control problem !: see kittybungalow.org

Looking for a new employee to join the team... check out the Second Chance Animal Rescue Working Class Program !: see secondchanceanimalrescue.com

Darwin, On the Special Expressions of Cats, 1872: see biblioklept.org

Annalee Newitz, Domestic Cats are Destroying the Planet: see gizmodo.com

The Black Cat (Sabo-Tabby), International of the Workers of the World Historical Archives, August 12, 2011: see archive.iww.org

Effects of meat consumption: Food and Agricultural Organization's figures only give an order of magnitude of the issue. See ourworlddata.org 

Jonathan Foer, Eating Animals, Back Bay Books, 2010.

In The Uncanny, a horror anthology movie (1977), cats are in fact the real masters over humans, and maintain their mastery by whatever means available, murder included.

Tail end of the essay: Beware of ailurophobia

"Ailurophobia is one of the most prevailing disorders worldwide and is associated with major anxiety which leads to depression and other serious neurological disorders. Ailurophobia refers to the fear of cat that is also associated with hatred of cat that will lead to severe anxiousness, depression and sometimes demise of an individual." (Hamdard Journal of Pharmacy, Vol. 2, 2021)