The Broader Picture: Familiar in their strangemess

BRITAIN has hundreds of cat shows. On 24 July, for example, the Gwynedd Cat Club Championship Show will be held in Clwyd. A week later, the Kensington Kitten and Neuter Premier Cat Club Show takes place, curiously, in the New Spectrum Leisure Centre in Guildford. The culminating event of the season is the National Cat Show at Olympia, run by the general council of the National Cat Fancy; and boy, do the owners of these contestants fancy cats. But what of the creatures themselves? They stare out of their cages, as alien and distant as extraterrestrials.

Photographs of cats tend to the sentimental or downright twee, but these faces tell a different, older story, one of sexuality and magic, superstition and fear. One can fathom the soul of a dog in no time, but a cat - even the tamest household moggy - guards its secrets. Its sphinx-like inscrutability can inspire awe and veneration, whether in ancient Egypt or modern Olympia. More often, however, it has provoked mistrust. Look at the entry under 'Cat' in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1787: 'They are full of cunning and dissimulation; they conceal all their designs; seize every opportunity of doing mischief, and then fly from punishment. They easily take on the habits of society, but never its manners; for they have only the appearance of friendship and attachment. This disingenuity of character is betrayed by the obliquity of their movements and the ambiguity of their looks. In a word, the cat is totally destitute of friendship; he thinks and acts for himself alone.'

Small wonder that the cat has had such a rough voyage through history. Across much of medieval Europe, religious festivals and the end of the harvest were commonly marked by feline sacrifice, as a protection against sickness and witchcraft. A highlight of the London coronation procession of Elizabeth I was the ceremonial burning of a wicker basket filled with cats, who 'squalled in a most hideous manner as soon as they felt the fire'. In 1638 a live cat was roasted in Ely Cathedral, to the delight of 'a large and boisterous crowd'.

Marie Lamont, a young Scotswoman tried for witchcraft in 1662, confessed 'that shee, Kettie Scot, and Margaret Holm cam to Allan Orr's house in the likeness of kats, and followed his wif into the chalmer, where they took a herring owt of a barrel, and having taken a byt off it, they left it behind them . . . his wif did eat, and yairefter taking heavy disease, died.'

These melancholy echoes may seem almost inaudible in the cheerful bustle of Britain's cat shows. But just as death is present even in Arcadia, so the darker manifestations of ailurophobia can be discerned even in modern, post-religious, pet-loving Britain. Four teenagers were prosecuted in Caerphilly last year for cutting off the legs and tail of a cat and then throwing it, alive, on to a fire; two years earlier, detectives investigated the sacrificial killing of a cat on a beach near Bristol.

Studying the opaque eyes and aloof serenity of the animals in these photographs, one sees cat-hating as the revenge of ugliness against beauty, the tribute ignorance pays to a mystery it can never hope to understand.

Francis Wheen is the editor of 'The Chatto Book of Cats' to be published later this year.

(Photographs omitted)