Of course, I’ve known this for years, being the self-professed crazy cat lady that I am. I was driving somewhere and listened to this episode on NPR about perfect animals, and was nodding my head like I was listening to a great song. So…I had to look up the article to share all the relevant details for y’all. Anjali Goswami, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, shared her perspective on why she believes cats are perfect. She doesn’t state this from the same perspective as I, a person who loves cats and prefers them over dogs, but from a scientific perspective. Here is what I learned from that interview:

Goswami bases her conclusion on studies of large-scale patterns of evolution in vertebrate animals over time. Basically, every cat does the same thing. They are hard-core predators.
Cats are one of the most similar species in existence. Other animals have greater evolutionary differences in an attempt to become more perfect. Not cats…they are basically the same. Sure, they come in different colors and sizes, but they essentially have the same structure. She argues that sameness is because there was no need to evolve into something different.
Goswami claims: “It doesn’t matter whether they’re tiny Bengal cats or gigantic lions or tigers; they’re gonna basically look the same. If you handed me a lion or tiger skull, I could not—as a person who’s a pretty solid expert in carnivorans in general—tell you which one it was. There’s a teeny amount of allometry [disproportionate change in one body part relative to the whole as a consequence of size] if they get really big: a small elongation of the face and an increase in muscle mass. Ultimately, big cats are really similar to small cats, far more so than you would predict.”
The bottom line is they don’t need a variation in their species. They do one thing and one thing well, not a “jack-of-all-trades.” Their prey might vary depending on the size of the cat, but as predators, they do that perfectly. Contrast that with bears, who very much need to adapt to their geographic location. Polar bears are very different from the Giant Panda bear…and not only in size and color.

So…there you have it…an expert opinion on why cats are perfect…which is the reason I prominently feature cats in many of my books, including basing my latest book, The Kitten Trap, on the movie classic, The Parent Trap. Obviously, I replaced those pesky human twins with kittens! Click on any of the links below to get this creative retelling of the classic movie. Another book with a cat POV and very near and dear to my heart is Artist Free Zone, loosely based on my own personal love story!