Okay you mathematics smart arses...

[logansrogue]

I need some help here. This is a complicated problem.

In the time of Alexander the Great, there were no cats in Greece. If there were, they were VERY rare. They were often taken on board ships to keep the population of rats down. Lord knows how they stayed there with their hatred of water! That aside, Alexander the Great decided to bring the newly domesticated cat he saw in Egypt back with him to Greece. He probably made sure that there were regular shipments of them into Greece for the ruling class to enjoy.

So this is in the year 323 BC. What I want to know is what the cat population of Greece would be in the year 51 BC.

The following parameters would make it easier:

- The number of cats being shipped into Greece in the first instance? Let's say it's fifty.
- Fifty more are brought each year.
- The average litter of each queen is four. Half of the cats brought in are female.
- Each cat lives for five years.
- Each queen continues to have litters every six months.
- Half of each litter is male and the other half female.

I don't know how particularly accurate this would be, but it would most certainly give a nice rough number.

Why do I want to know this magic number, you may ask? Don't ask. Just don't. Oh, okay, I may as well say since people might actually be bothered solving this little problem which I have NO idea how to solve.

I'm writing a Xena story, and I need to know if, when she was around (roughly 50 BC) cats were common enough in Greece for poor families to have, or whether they were still exotic animals limited to the cities (Athens, Corinth, Thebes, etc). If they weren't, then it's plausible that Gabrielle may never have seen a cat before. (Xena would have since she's travelled, and Joxer most definitely since he lived in Athens growing up. His mother might have even have had one, being a warlord's wife and the reciever of many fine gifts). If they were, then she most likely had one on her farm. So it's kinda important to the way the story goes whether they're common or not.

I know, I go to ridiculous lengths for fic. You should see all the research I do for some of these things. Like the Hamunaptra series? I study music of the time, history in the region, the actual events of the time which the movie is roughly based on, and when writing in new mythology, I gather it from details of real events in Ancient Egypt. With my Albanach fic? Which is an Elseworlds Logan/Marie fic taking place at the time of the 1296-14 invasion of Scotland? Not only did I read fat honking Nigel Tranter fics, but downloaded htmls and studied history books, picking out exact battles and areas, knowing where everything happened, so I could accurately plot Logan and Marie's adventures through Scotland. With my Xena fic, Little Old Lady from Pasadena, which involves racing chariots, I researched real chariots of the time and learnt about the way they were built so I could have Gabrielle and Joxer accurately talk about the parts of the chariots and how to make them go faster. With my X-Men fic? I studied up on the race for mapping the human genome, and where humans were with cloning and so forth. The list goes on and on.

When it comes to writing, I am so God-damned obsessive-compulsive!! LOL!

Comments

[tiberius-n.livejournal.com]

I have nothing constructive to say other than MST 3000 mood icon Yay

[fair-terentia.livejournal.com]

Okay, I don't know anything about cats in Greece (or Xena really), but I've never heard of them being kept as domestic animals in Rome. By 50 BC Athens would be part of Rome's growing empire so you probably need to look at domestic animals in Rome. At around that period Catullus' girlfriend had a pet sparrow. There were hunting dogs, birds- large and small, crickets I think but I haven't heard of cats, either domesticated or wild. I don't believe they ate them either so I'd assume they were pretty rare. And if they were rare in Rome they'd be even rarer in Athens, since the empire had considerably dimished by then. Whether there were wild cats though, I do not know.

I hope this was in some way helpful!

[starfyre01.livejournal.com]

Dogs, mice and turtles were very common pets in ancient Greece. Cats, however, weren't, so it's highly unlikely that Gabby ever saw a domesticated cat until she traveled to Egypt.

Okie dokie: taking this down to a single year timeline (since that's probably the best):

You've got 25 males & 25 females. Assuming that all pairs 'mate' successfully twice a year, 25 (queens) x 8 (total number of kittens for successful matings 2x) = 200 kittens in total, but then it gets complicated because I don't know when cats mate for the first time agewise...

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

1 year.

[starfyre01.livejournal.com]

Okay, that means for the original lot of 25 queens, they would mate about 8 times in total, so 8 kittens per year for 4 years=32 kittens for 1 queen. 32 kittens x 25 queens=800 kittens, 400 of which would be female...

My head is hurting now - and this makes me thankful that I didn't decide to take up accounting or another math-based career.

[dafwarg.livejournal.com]

okay - I think your algorithm has a few flaws...

Not including cats being brought in after the initial import:

I assumed that cats can breed after 6 months, with a 6 month gestation (wrong, but computationally easier). Assuming that every cat brought over originally was 6 months old, then 6 months in all 25 female cats give birth to 4 kittens, 2 male, 2 female). That gives you 150 cats after 6 months. 6 months later, the original 25 give birth again to another 100 cats, 50 of them female, 50 of them male, giving you 250 cats in all. Another 6 months and the first lot of offspring breed as well, giving you 650 cats in total. This continues.

After 4.5 years, your original cats die off, but you still have 127200 cats in total. This number increases exponentially, so after 8 years, you have 60453650 cats... yes, that's 60 million cats. This is where I stopped, given that I don't think you want a figure that unrealistic.

And remember, this didn't include bringing in extra cats each year.

[starfyre01.livejournal.com]

This makes me glad that I'm not a math major :-P Ouch.

[sakurakiss.livejournal.com]

McCoy! <3<3 The character went to college at Ole Miss, which is where my grandfather went and where I am trying to get into now, so much admiration for Bonesy!

[starfyre01.livejournal.com]

McCoy is my absolutely favorite original series Star Trek character. He just rocked - and he truly was a character to admire. He wasn't perfect, but he had class even when he was being SuperGrouch (which made me <3 him even more) :-)

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

AH. Fuck. That can't be right...

[starfyre01.livejournal.com]

It makes your head hurt, doesn't it? I always hated word problems in math. Give me a complex equation to solve any day and I can do 'em, but word problems? Gah. The mental pain!

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking there needs to be a better die off rate cause that's just fucking ridiculous...

[pooxs.livejournal.com]

what about biodiversity? or do cats not care about incest?

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Well, that's what the new cats are for, but no, cats generally don't care about incest. Ew, I know.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Send them the movie, Frank!

[pooxs.livejournal.com]

i find it interesting that most animals generally do the incest thing but there are rarely problems you would think (that the scientists like to warn us about) would happen.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

This is strange because I've read that cats were pretty popular in Rome. And I've read that there were illustrations from Greece of children playing with cats. Maybe they were of a later period? Who knows.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Not on the outset, no. Not looking at it. But all the offspring inherit their parents weaknesses instead of breeding them out.

[starfyre01.livejournal.com]

Well, back then you'd eventually lose at least half of the original population of cats that had been brought over from Egypt due to diseases, natural and un-natural causes, I'd wager, plus you also have to figure that even though the original 25 queens had all live births, you'd have kittens die for the above mentioned reasons. There's so many factors that you can play with here.

[nephron.livejournal.com]

If they're lucky.

I remember this poor little 8 month old kitten at the Cat Haven, with her 6 week kitten.

It made me cry :-(

[nephron.livejournal.com]

The (genetic) risks of incest aren't huge if it's a one-off.

So if you marry your cousin, that's one thing. But if the children from that marriage have children with relatives, and then those children have children with relatives and so on, you end up with problems like you see in the royal families in Europe.

[sakurakiss.livejournal.com]

I like him because he's a Southern boy. I <3 the Southern accent...of course I'm Southern, so I'm a little partial to it! XDD

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

Cats can start breeding from the tender age of 4 months.

[windtear.livejournal.com]

The problems are there if you know what to look for.

Rottweilers can't go up or down stairs, or if they do, be prepared for a rheumaticky dog from about the age of six (as opposed to the more usual ten to twelve), as Rottis have very shallow hip sockets that get displaced if you breathe on them wrong. Blame inbreeding.

Siamese cats are all crazy. This is not hearsay or an anti-cat thing; it's genetic, it's proven, and it's because they're so inbred.

The Persian deafness gene will never go away. And so on.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Yup. Plenty of things go wrong with inbreeding.

[windtear.livejournal.com]

First off, general cats don't hate water. There are several breeds that are known to go fishing and/or hunt waterfowl, and individual cats from every breed that can be quite cheerful about the prospect of a hot bath. What the cat hates is being in an environment they aren't familiar with, which is not an incomprehensible attitude, I think.

The ships' cats I've met were, to a kitten, born on a boat, or in a shipyard. They grew up on boats, either on the sea or in dock, and when on land, rarely venture further inland than the shipyard or the inland side of the dock. They're not familiar with land, they don't like it, and they much prefer planks (or these days, fibreglass) beneath their paws, thanks.

I don't doubt that some kittens that were born to the cats that came on the boats stayed in Greece. But I would expect that the vast majority of kittens (that survived - ships' cats worked and there was no extra food for a furry soul) were traded between ships' crews (to older ships to replace cats that had died, or to new crews that didn't have a ship's cat yet) and stayed at sea.

So I think your equation is flawed from the beginning, because the kittens just wouldn't leave the ships.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

It's not the ships that the domestic cats came from in the equation. They were cats brought in to become pets for people.

[windtear.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That's different. Because in that case I wouldn't expect a constant influx. Most modern pet breed lines are traced back to a small group of imported animals that have in recent years been carefully bred out to avoid (more) incest and add desired attributes (cf: the history of non-traditionally-coloured Siamese cats). I'd expect a small pool to start off with and then near-constant inbreeding.

I'm referencing the case of Siamese cats in Britain, and I think that's a good place to start looking, because here we have a small population in an isolated area that could not pull in new blood, that was actively encouraged to expand. Halfbreed cats were common but never permitted to enter the breeding pools. The problems were noted and breeders did try to minimise them, so we have a record of the problems incest produces and the strategies practiced to prevent them. I think it's worth looking at.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Yes but why wouldn't they bring more in if there was a demand? Other than the fact that the Egyptians guarded the cats zealously at one point, once Greece and Rome took over the place, they could do what they want with the cats. At that point there was a lot of interbreeding between 'domestic' cats and the wild species that lived throughout Europe. This would have caused some biodiversity.

I'm still trying to figure this all out, so half the things I'm saying are me thinking out loud.