Diana Cooper believes that her cat, Fortune, was hurt in a fight with a fisher, sometimes called a fisher cat. (click on title to entry, thank you)
Another article 'of interest.'
Why the cat was 'tamed' --but stayed aloof
By Robert Mitchum
Tribune staff reporter
Published June 29, 2007
Inside the cells of every pet cat lies a history book, a story detailing the journey from the wilds of Asia to the comforts of a windowsill perch.
Combining the fields of genetics and archeology, scientists have cracked open the book to find that cat domestication occurred near the beginning of human civilization, long before many previous archeological estimates. The circumstances of this early association between man and cat may explain the friendly but tenuous truce between felines and humans.
Published Friday in the journal Science, the research used DNA from modern house cats to trace the origin of domestic cats back to a specific time and region that coincided with the settlement of humans in the Middle East region known as the Fertile Crescent.
Geneticists studied cats as a domestic pet unique in its persistent similarity to its wild ancestors. Modern cats were traced to a common ancestor: a particular species of wildcat that still lives in the same region.
"Our study was able to localize it down to one subspecies whose range included the Near East," said Oxford University zoologist Carlos Driscoll. "Within the Near East was the Fertile Crescent, which is the most likely spot for domestication to have occurred."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/premium/printedition/Friday/chi-catsjun29,1,6855169.story
