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If a Cat Could Speak
Paperback
Series: If They Could Speak, Book 10
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 14 2025
Pages: 72
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.15 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
She is a tabby called Pudding, she lives at number twelve in a south London terrace, and after about ten thousand years of being misunderstood she has decided to set the record straight.
She explains why she cannot taste sugar, why her eyes shine in the dark and why she almost always lands on her feet. She reveals the real story of how cats came to live with people, starting with a cat buried beside a human being on Cyprus about 9,500 years ago, long before the pharaohs. She takes you to ancient Egypt, where Bastet's festival drew hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and whole households shaved their eyebrows when the family cat died.
Then comes the darker side: medieval Europe, black cats and witches, and the festival bonfires on which cats were burnt in parts of Europe until about 1800. She tells you what the purr, the meow and the slow blink really mean, and what scientists found when they tested cats for the kind of attachment once thought to belong only to dogs and humans.
She introduces the famous cats of history: Trim, who sailed around Australia with Matthew Flinders; Mrs Chippy, who went south with Shackleton; Simon, the ship's cat who won a medal for bravery; Félicette, the first cat in space; and the long line of mousers at 10 Downing Street, from Humphrey to Larry. She meets the Cheshire Cat, Puss in Boots, Dick Whittington's cat, Dr Johnson's Hodge and Kipling's Cat That Walked by Himself.
And she is honest about the trouble with cats: what the research says about birds and wildlife in Britain, America, Australia and on islands around the world.
Funny, sharp and carefully researched, this book checks every fact and every quotation against real sources, and a closing section sets out what we know, what we don't, and the popular beliefs about cats that turn out to be wrong.
If a Cat Could Speak is for curious readers of every age, and for anyone who has ever been stared at by a cat and wondered what she was thinking.
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