The man who reinvented the cat

There's a movie with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Wain. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021). Not my favorite movie, but maybe someone here might like it.

"Weasel-­faced and rat-tailed". WTF? Has this guy ever seen cats, rats, and weasels? Weasels have long pointy faces, cats have short flat ones. Outside the primates, you would be hard-pressed to find an animal whose face looks less like a weasel's, nor more like a human's, than a cat's. Similarly, rates have naked tails, cats have fluffy tails. A cat's tail looks less like a rat's tail than a monkey's does. The only animals that are less "rat-tailed" than cats are ones that have no tails at all.

The article of course is about how Mr Wain invented one (rather odd) image of cats in Victorian literature. The cats themselves seem to have remained much the same for millenia. Which in itself is interesting as dogs have hugely been changed from their wolf origins by selective breeding but cats seem to have mostly remained independent and done their own thing.

This article is focused just on western views on cats. Particularly British views.

Views of cats throughout history and in other parts of the world aren’t covered in this article. No mention of how changing British views of the cat may or may not have had influence on the culture of British colonies either.

I did find the article interesting though.