Chapter 3: Feral cats in the city.

This chapter focuses on a study of feral cats in Hull, England which suggests a number of possible relationships between people, animals and place, and a complexity which is at variance with the singular, negative view projected by the Cat Action Trust. More generally, representations of feral cats in their relationship with the built environment and urban wilderness provide a commentary on attitudes to nature and civilisation. Feral cats occupy a zone somewhere else on the domestic-wild spectrum. As members of the same species as pet cats, either ex-pets, dumped cats or born into a feral colony, they are all potential pets. Some ferals may live in close proximity to humans, even occasionally occupying domestic space, whereas other feral groups live entirely apart from people while depending on resources generated by human settlement. In overdeveloped societies, cats as wild animals also have a place on the fringes of civilisation, as a real or imagined and occasional threat to the settled population, and this is probably reflected in attitudes to feral animals in appropriate settings. Wildness in cats is, on the one hand, unsettling because it contradicts the idea of the cat as a domestic, pet animal close to humans, and on the other hand, it is a source of desire.