August 2000
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PUSSIES GALORE - Wildlife on One, August 2000
Rome there is one defining detail more eternal than the perfectly-frothed cappuccino, the screaming Vespa scooter, the straggle of visiting nuns from all over the world heading for St Peter's. It is well-fed, free-born Roman cat.
This inscrutable link with the city's prodigious past lives here, wild and privileged. The feral cat is fully protected by Italy's Byzantine legal system, and pampered by a doting army of elegant ladies of indeterminate age, the Gattara, or Cat Women.
In Rome fat tabbies loll like disdainful empresses on the bonnets of Maseratis parked up quiet side roads. Strutting, streetwise toms sift through choice left-overs outside three star restaurants. Kittens frolic on the toes of colossal statues.
Peer down into any of the numerous scavi aperti - open excavations - and you will probably spot a feline lothario questing for romance.
But it is in the Roman Forum, the epicentre of the ancient world's mightiest empire, where the cats most closely imitate their distant wild ancestors from the plains of Africa.
Trajan's Forum, set apart from the main section of the Forum which the public visit by the road that Mussolini criminally build over the middle of the remains, is that most famous of lion habitats, Africa's Ngorongoro Crater, in urban microcosm. A deep pit strewn with chunks of ancient masonry instead of volcanic rock. Shade comes not from an acasia tree, but the 40 metre high Trajan's column. Instead of distant mountains, there is the promethean bulk of the Colluseum.
For six months a camera team from the BBC's Wildlife on One applied the classic wildlife filming techniques to trail one of the most closely monitored of all feral cat communities. I met the stars of City of the Wild Cats in the company of Eugenia Natoli of the Roman Veterinary Service, scientific adviser to the film.
She arrived on a Vespa, voguishly dressed for another kind of catwalk, and led me down a flight of stone steps to the secluded site. At her call a dozen cats pranced out from among the old stones.
At first they seemed interchangeable with any family moggy. One scratched vigorously on a plank, proof conclusive that cats don't need best quality furniture to keep their claws sharp. Another, from this year's crop of kittens, rubbed against my legs. I longed to try the newspaper test.
If I laid out Corriera della Sera to read, would a cat immediately curl up in the middle of it? But these cats were only meeting us half way across a big divide. They grow up aloof and apart in their wild world; the film crew took great pains not to stroke or even touch the cats lest they change their behaviour.
You don't need a fevered imagination to count these cats directly back to the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, when cats were first introduced from Egypt to hunt rodents around the grain stores. Archaeologists have found ancient cat bones in Roman ruins here.
Eugenia allows romance to briefly intrude on her science. "I like to think the souls of the emperors are playing here and teasing us through these cats." Indeed some of the names the Wildlife on One team gave the main players, to help the story, proved to be uncannily appropriate.
Old Caesar prowls only yards from where his namesake was famously assassinated. Once the great leader, he is losing his grip. The black and white upstart Brutus is in his prime and threatens to oust him. Livia is not quite top female, but soon will be. We are close to the remains of the palace of her namesake, the arch schemer, famously played by Sian Philips in the BBC dramatisation of I Claudius. Livia upheld imperial family values by deftly murdering any young royal who could compete with her own children. However this Livia goes to the opposite extreme, gathering up kittens that aren't even her's to look after. Whatever their lineage Roman cats have the full protection of the convoluted majesty of Italian law. Cats have the right to live, unmolested, in the district where they were born. There are over 2000 colonies of feral cats in Rome. At lean times the cat community in Trajan's Forum can rely on the Gattara, who feed them choice morsels from their tables. Even here there is not enough natural prey all year round to support them. But in the summer they are perfectly capable of catering for themselves. They hunt alone through the flush of summer weeds, their hunched shoulders undulating, inching silently forward to their scaled-down prey of pigeons and lizards. Cameraman Barrie Britton used the same techniques he would apply on the African savannah for some classic hunting sequences. Wherever possible, he filmed the cats at their eye level. After a few weeks he transmitted an unusual request back to the Natural History Unit in Bristol. "Send knee pads. Crawling around on all this marble is murder." Bush skills were very necessary. Once Livia disappeared. Aidan ???[surname], one of the best leopard spotters of the African plain, and a veteran of Big Cat Diary, eventually found her tucked away under a slab of marble, preparing for motherhood. If we are drawing parallells with this cat society, we should pitch them nearer the decadent, moral anarchy of Caligula and Nero than the dull solemnity of Augustus. (Remember the Brian Blessed part in I Claudius?). In short this is a mad, mating free for all. Every available male couples, from as young as ten months, with every female. Livia's kittens have quite distinct colouration, suggesting multiple paternity. This is common in urban cats: between 70% and 83% of urban litters at a study in France shared more than one father, whereas the figure is much lower in rural populations (from 0% to 22% of litters). Scientists believe the wide availability of food is one factor reducing the need for the conventional male hierarchy. However these cats do not make easy scientific subjects. When Eugenia and her assistant tried to take samples to make genetic sense of the complicated daliances, the sample of fur they needed for analysis seemed Superglued to their bodies. And finding a vein for a blood sample was much more difficult than on a domestic cat, because the animals were so, literally, thick skinned. This is a wildlife film, but the artistic antennae of any camera team working in Rome on whatever subject cannot fail to pick up the resonances of illustrious Roman film makers, of Fellini and Antonioni, and of the city itself as setting for movies like Roman Holiday, "I tried to get all the Roman films out, to get the feel of the place," said producer Hugh Pearson. "Not for imitation, but inspiration. "It was such fun working in Rome. We are used to living in the bush in tents. Here we had a flat for six months, took taxis to the location and popped out for a cappuccino in our breaks. It was a wonderful location. There was the whole chic of Rome, all these beautiful women and well dressed people, and among them these dusty, scruffy film makers - one with knee pads." David Attenborough, who, as with all Wildlife on Ones, delivers the commentary, was not on location this time. Nor was the other illustrious support player, the cameraman and film maker Simon King, who has an unusual credit as scriptwriter. He was not required to tweak the plot for dramatic effect. In the film the cat, to quote T.S. Eliot's Cats, "will do as he do do". Everything happens as it happens. At one point the action took a decidedly feline 101 Dalmations twist, with producer Hugh Pearson cast as Mr Darling. "I felt like the nervous father-to-be, ringing Eugenia almost every day for the latest news on the preganant females. Then there was a time when I couldn't reach her for days. Eventually she rang back and said they had lost all the kittens. I was frantic. Then she rang again to say they had all be found unharmed. Livia had decided to move them all." Kittens do disappear, but Eugenia says they are not taken by some sinister Cruella de Ville cat-napper. They usually go to somebody's home. And in cat-loving Rome, that is almost certainly a good home. -------- Box. For many people in Britain feral cats are a holiday encounter. We see them around the resorts in Turkey and Greece and of course Italy. They are more tolerated in Mediterranean lands. And, as an animal originating in the desert, they find it easier to raise their young in a warm, dry climate. But there are still an estimated 1-2 million feral cats in Britain, and, says cat expert Dr John Bradshaw of the School of Biological Sciences, Southampton University, they play an increasingly important role in sustaining the pet population There are now probably very few large feral cats communities left in Britain. Some of the best known, in such places as Portsmouth and Gosport naval dockyards, have been broken up. Most feral cats, apart from those living in some comfort on farms, tend to be shadowy and secretive. "Group living is probably the exception. And it is very hard for feral cats to raise kittens in the wild and carry on a lineage. But I suspect there are large numbers of solitary feral cats moving around, grabbing bits of food here and there," said Dr Bradshaw. "We recently carried out a DNA study in Southampton, checking the paternity of every kitten we could lay hands on. We knew who the mothers were, un-neutered pet cats. We had also DNA finger-printed every large pet male that we knew about. Almost without exception the fathers of the kittens were unidentified, most likely feral males just roaming around." If we care for the standard issue, non-pedigree pet cat, we should be concerned for the fate of feral cats. In many parts of the country, the pet cat population is now no longer self sustaining. A high level of neutering means far fewer kittens are being produced. There are now more feral cats breeding in the UK than pet cats, says Dr Bradshaw. If we neuter or get rid of all feral cats, which are currently supplying lots of new pet kittens, we would have to find a way to replace them through some kind of organised breeding programme."