Why Cats?
I enjoy speaking about cozy mysteries at libraries and other venues. Lately I’ve been giving a talk I call “Crafts, Cooking, and Cats: The Contemporary Cozy Mystery,” and when I first devised it, I prepared a one-paragraph description for groups to use in promoting the event. I ended the description with the line, “And cozy mysteries almost always include cats . . . just because.”
The books in my Knit & Nibble series certainly do, and cats feature prominently on my covers, as they do on the covers of so many other cozy mysteries. I’ve given the talk at several local libraries, as well as presenting it to seniors’ groups and women’s clubs, and fortunately no one has ever asked me why cozy mysteries almost always include cats. If they had, I wouldn’t until recently have had an answer any better than “just because.”
But then I started thinking about the relationship between cats and cozies, actively pondering why the pairing seems so natural. Certainly cats are associated with cozy interiors, and most cozies unfold against a backdrop of cozy interiors. I even think of my Knit & Nibble books as Martha Stewart with murders.
Cats are well-suited to domestic spaces. They are small, clean, and graceful. (They might knock knick-knacks off tables but they don’t knock over furniture.) They are even decorative—one might think of them as ambulatory throw pillows. And they are a warm presence to cuddle with on a chilly evening.
But there’s more. Cats are associated with that momentous development in human history when humans transitioned from living as hunter-gatherers to settling in permanent communities. As hunter-gatherers we domesticated dogs—or perhaps they domesticated themselves, following bands of roving humans and scavenging what remained after the humans had feasted on the game brought down in a successful hunt.
Then it occurred to these hunting-gathering humans that instead of moving around looking for food, they could arrange to have food, in a sense, come to them. By domesticating animals and sowing seeds for a predictable harvest, they were able to settle in one place and build permanent dwellings. And surplus food—grain, for example—could be stored to be eaten during seasons when fresh food could not be grown.
With the storage of food came a problem, however. Other creatures besides humans, namely rats and other rodents, realized that having a cache of stored food at hand made life a lot pleasanter than being constantly on the move in search of nourishment. The wild ancestors of our domestic cats, carnivores uninterested in grain but interested in rodents, also realized that having a predictable source of food at hand made their lives pleasanter. The rodents that congregated around stored food were as appreciated by the wild cats as the stored food was to the humans, and the cats were appreciated for the useful service they provided in keeping the rats at bay.
So cats also domesticated themselves, choosing to live among humans (but really attracted by the rodents) once humans stopped wandering and formed settled communities. Eventually cats were invited indoors, where they became useful mousers as well. But they also became furry fixtures in domestic spaces, decorative and entertaining, and indelibly associated with human domesticity and the pursuit of the cozy.
The books in my Knit & Nibble series certainly do, and cats feature prominently on my covers, as they do on the covers of so many other cozy mysteries. I’ve given the talk at several local libraries, as well as presenting it to seniors’ groups and women’s clubs, and fortunately no one has ever asked me why cozy mysteries almost always include cats. If they had, I wouldn’t until recently have had an answer any better than “just because.”
But then I started thinking about the relationship between cats and cozies, actively pondering why the pairing seems so natural. Certainly cats are associated with cozy interiors, and most cozies unfold against a backdrop of cozy interiors. I even think of my Knit & Nibble books as Martha Stewart with murders.
Cats are well-suited to domestic spaces. They are small, clean, and graceful. (They might knock knick-knacks off tables but they don’t knock over furniture.) They are even decorative—one might think of them as ambulatory throw pillows. And they are a warm presence to cuddle with on a chilly evening.
But there’s more. Cats are associated with that momentous development in human history when humans transitioned from living as hunter-gatherers to settling in permanent communities. As hunter-gatherers we domesticated dogs—or perhaps they domesticated themselves, following bands of roving humans and scavenging what remained after the humans had feasted on the game brought down in a successful hunt.
Then it occurred to these hunting-gathering humans that instead of moving around looking for food, they could arrange to have food, in a sense, come to them. By domesticating animals and sowing seeds for a predictable harvest, they were able to settle in one place and build permanent dwellings. And surplus food—grain, for example—could be stored to be eaten during seasons when fresh food could not be grown.
With the storage of food came a problem, however. Other creatures besides humans, namely rats and other rodents, realized that having a cache of stored food at hand made life a lot pleasanter than being constantly on the move in search of nourishment. The wild ancestors of our domestic cats, carnivores uninterested in grain but interested in rodents, also realized that having a predictable source of food at hand made their lives pleasanter. The rodents that congregated around stored food were as appreciated by the wild cats as the stored food was to the humans, and the cats were appreciated for the useful service they provided in keeping the rats at bay.
So cats also domesticated themselves, choosing to live among humans (but really attracted by the rodents) once humans stopped wandering and formed settled communities. Eventually cats were invited indoors, where they became useful mousers as well. But they also became furry fixtures in domestic spaces, decorative and entertaining, and indelibly associated with human domesticity and the pursuit of the cozy.
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