The 10 Best Cat Trees

Cats have been domesticated for a really long time, but they haven't lived full-time inside the house for very long at all. So, the history of the cat tree is, frankly, short. You just want to know you can put the thing together and your cat will like it. So instead of going into that, I will give you a little cat history, minus the tree part for now.

Like all relationships humans develop, the human-cat relationship is now and has been for approximately 12,000 years a mutually beneficial one. It all started in the Fertile Crescent (aka the Cradle of Civilization) with the birth of agriculture. This area is the sweet spot between desert and mountains that turned out to be perfect for growing crops. In 1906, a University of Chicago archaeologist named James Henry Breasted named it both for its croissant-like shape that crosses the modern-day borders of Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territory, Turkey and Iran, and, obviously, for its fertile clime.

So it goes that once humans had achieved the feat of planting seeds, nurturing them in the soil, harvesting their mature plants, and storing the resulting grains, opportunistic rodents became a big problem. But as the grain had attracted mice and rats, so the rodents attracted cats. After that, it was a mere 1000 years before the cats of yesteryear developed into the domesticated cat we know today.

The first cat cemetery was discovered in Cyprus, and indicates that cats and humans lived symbiotically as far back as 9500BC. They got there from Egypt, and the ancient Egyptians loved cats, and even walked them on leashes, I gather. And, of course, they mummified them. Don't let the photo accompanying this litte essay freak you out. Those are mummified cats. Egyptians loved to breed and domesticate animals. Once they had cross-bred wild cats for size and domesticated them, they really went cat crazy. They treated them like gods. They made strict laws.

If you killed a cat in ancient Egypt, you were killed in turn, even if it was an accident. And you weren't allowed to export them. After all, these were the animals that kept the icky ones away from Egyptian homes: poisonous snakes, disease-carrying rodents and the like. Soon enough, people started putting out a little food for their little protectors. Then they let them in the house. Then the cats had kittens in the house, and the kittens were brought up around humans.

Cats quickly discovered that humans were rodent-magnets. They followed humans onto ships and crossed the seas with them, first to Rome when Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire (around 31BC), then across Europe, and eventually they arrived in Jamestown, VA and Plymouth, MA with the first settlers. They are, in fact, legit DAR - sons, too.

No one really thought about having cats live indoors, because they were mousers. And they were a little weird about burying their poop. And the smell of cat pee just never really comes out. Plus they need fresh meat to live. It took a combination of 20th century inventions to bring them in for good: refrigeration and kitty litter.

Maybe it's this long gap between when humans discovered that cats were darned useful and when they discovered they could keep them inside without stinking up the joint that has kept the cat's outdoor survival skills in tact.