Cats Plot To Take Over The World By Stephen Budiansky: Chapter Summary

Stephen Budiansky is a renowned author of multiple books about animals, nature, science and animal behavior and in this book, did not fail to follow this theme. Budiansky wrote this book in hopes of giving someone an inside view into the mind of cats to explain their behaviors that people love and the behaviors that people hate. This book talks about the beginnings of the relationship between cats and humans and how or why these mysterious animals have kept many of the behaviors of their wild ancestors. Even though this book may not be a great read for scientists who are looking for actual proof to cat’s behaviors, it sure is a great read for the general population. The first chapter in this book, “Cats Plot to Take Over the World, and Succeed’,

A major downfall of this chapter however is that Budiansky includes only the detailed study done on the fur of cats in Europe but not in other countries to compare the relative densities of fur colors. As a scientist, this would be extremely frustrating to read as using only one study to define fur color for a species is extremely unreliable and does not follow the basic principles of the scientific method. While the study that was performed on fur color in Europe was extensive and gave a lot of evidence towards how the fur color of cats was in a way selectively chosen by people, it can’t be used to summarize the movement of fur color across the globe. The author also mistakenly states that cats can’t be selectively bred for certain fur colors as it doesn’t work due to the cats not willing to deal with this, but in a way humans did selectively choose for the fur colors of cats. Throughout the time that cats and humans have been in contact with each other, people selectively chose to keep cats that were either nicer or had a fur color that the person enjoyed. This actively choosing of a certain cat is selectively choosing for certain traits in the cats and is what led to the specific fur colors that people pay exorbitant amounts of money for. These fur colors may have spontaneously occurred along the history of cats but humans selectively bred these cats for this fur color. Therefore, even though cats aren’t as easy to selectively breed such as dogs or horses, they can be selectively bred making what the author stated incorrect. Also, the author mentions quite a bit about how inbreeding in cats is a huge problem as it causes defects in offspring and this bit of information is important as something people believe that cats can inbreed with