Domestic cats have lived with humans for thousands of years, but experts say there’s much we still don’t know about their genetics, health and behavior. An organization called Darwin’s Ark is asking Montanans to help crack some of those ancient secrets.
The community science nonprofit is using genetics and pet owner information to do that.
Dr. Elinor Karlsson is Darwin’s Ark co-founder and Chief Scientist. Karlsson, a professor at the Umass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, spoke about the project with MTPR’s Edward O'Brien.
Edward F. O'Brien: What don't we know about dogs and cats that veterinary science hasn't revealed long ago?
Elinor Karlsson: So one of the challenges with genetics is the genome, which is the DNA that you inherit from your parents. And in order to understand what it's doing, we want to have thousands, tens of thousands of participants to really figure out the most complicated sorts of diseases. You know, a lot of cats suffer from kidney disease, especially as they get older. There's probably some combination of genetic risk factors that cats are born with. So some are more likely to get kidney disease than others. But it's going to be a lot of different kinds of changes in their DNA, and then on top of that, you've got the environment that they're living in, the food they're eating, the kind of lifestyle they have, and all of those different factors interact with each other to produce that outcome of whether or not they develop kidney disease, and we're trying to untangle that.
Edward F. O'Brien: The Darwin's Ark website, it has two statements that I found really interesting. One of them I think you've covered. "When it comes to cats, scientists have more questions than answers." The second one, though — "cats are made for community science." How so?
Elinor Karlsson: People actually spend a lot of time watching their cats and paying attention to their behavior and wondering why it is that cats are doing the things that they're doing. That's exactly what we need — curious people that are asking those kinds of questions.
This started with the dogs. Many years ago — and it's actually still ongoing — we had a study. We were trying to understand whether compulsive behavior in dogs could possibly tell us something about a disease in humans called obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, and whether some of the genetics were shared between dogs and humans. And, it does look like there are. But I remember sitting around one day thinking that, well, compulsive disorders in dogs was a really interesting model. Maybe there was also something we could learn by just understanding why some dogs will retrieve a ball for hours and hours on end, and another dog — somehow their DNA has changed in some way that means that those dogs are really into retrieving balls, and I have no idea how you do that. And maybe that would tell us something about how genetics influences brains, and maybe ultimately about diseases like compulsive disorders. So possibly limiting ourselves to thinking about things that are diseases in our minds as opposed to just normal traits is actually limiting the way that we can understand behavior through the sort of pet world.
So we started adding questions about, not just compulsive behaviors, but also about things like retrieving and herding and howling and all these fun traits that dogs do. And so of course, once we got a cat project going, we're like, well, clearly we need to do the same thing for cats. And so we ask about whether your cat likes to climb up high or not, because that seems to differ between cats. We ask whether your cap plays fetch. I'm really excited to see what we can learn from that. If you fill out our surveys, we'll give you a personality report on your cat. It's based on something that scientifically is called a behavioral factor analysis, and we basically look how your cat compares to other cats in our data set on a variety of different traits.
Edward F. O'Brien: How many cats are enrolled in this project so far?
Elinor Karlsson: So we've got nearly 25,000 cats enrolled at this point in time. But one of the things we noticed when we were going through all of our data was that there were some places that we didn't have very many cats enrolled from and Montana was one of those places. So apparently at this time, we have 37 cats from Montana, and we would really love to have more cats from Montana.
Edward F. O'Brien: So you think there really are possible interesting differences between, whatever — a feral barn cat in Montana versus a cat somewhere in a Boston neighborhood.
Elinor Karlsson: There's a very small percentage of cats that are related to breeds. And then there's a large number of cats — most of the cats in this country — that are just cats. When people brought them to the Americas, they followed the people around and they spread out across this country. And so we think that the cats in Montana should be part of that giant migration as cats came to occupy basically every single place that humans occupy in this country because they really like being near us. We would like to be able to look at cats in Montana and figure out which cats they're most closely related to. Are they more closely related to cats coming from the West Coast or from the East Coast or are they their own thing? And we just don't know that yet.
Edward F. O'Brien: Final question, and that is: there are people who hate cats — my dad was one of them — and then there are people like me and you who love cats. Why do we love them so much?
Elinor Karlsson: Is a great question. You know, I think it's because they really like hanging out with us, you know? There's a mutual relationship there. I'm always fascinated by people that tell me that their cat doesn't really care about them that much, and then you talk to them a bit more and you're like, so when you're at home, where is your cat? And they're like oh, they're always in the same room as me, or they're always sitting at the end of the couch with me. Cats like having us around. They get a lot of comfort out of us being in their space and I think that we get the same feeling from them. Also, I mean, they are just a lot fun to watch.
Edward F. O'Brien: Dr. Elinor Karlsson, Darwin's Ark — darwinsark.org. So fascinating, so fun chatting with you. Thank you so much.
Elinor Karlsson: Thank you very much for the time, it was a lot of fun to talk.
