Did you know that you don’t need to get blown up by creepers all the time? Strange, but true. There’s a secret weapon you could be employing against those hissy green nuisances. It’s furry, it’s friendly, and it’ll frequently drop rotten flesh at your feet. It’s our mob of the month – the cat!
Given how beloved cats are to many people, it’s no surprise that they were added to Minecraft pretty early in the game’s development. It was version 1.2.1, to be precise, in March 2012 – which was so early we weren’t even naming the updates at that point yet. They arrived alongside iron golems, redstone lamps, and the jungle biome.
The timing of cats showing up at the same time as the jungle biome is no coincidence because originally you’d need to spend a while tracking down and taming a wild jungle cat – better known as an ocelot – to befriend one. Nowadays cats are a little more common. You’ll find them in well-populated villages, and also in swamp huts where they serve as a companion to lonely witches.
There are a bunch of different cat breeds you can find in the game. The cat-alogue includes black cats, British shorthairs, calico, Jellie, Persian, ragdoll, red, Siamese, tabby, tuxedo, and white cats. The tuxedo cat is based on lead designer Jeb’s pet cat Newton, who went to cat heaven in 2014, while the Jellie cat is based on a cat named Jellie belonging to YouTuber GoodTimesWithScar.
To tame a stray cat, you’ll need to slowly approach it while holding something tasty – raw cod or salmon usually does the trick. Feed the fish to the cat and a collar will appear around its neck, indicating that it was successfully tamed. Once tamed, you can hit the use key to make it sit in place – or let it follow you around, getting in the way of what you’re trying to do, but scaring off creepers and phantoms, who are terrified by these furry critters.
Oh, and there’s one more thing. Cats like to hunt in the night, so when you sleep there’s a chance that your cat will bring you a little gift. Forewarning: these gifts tend to be bits of dead animals.
In the real world, cats are thought to have been domesticated in the Eastern Mediterranean around 7500 BC – and today they’re one of the most commonly-found mammals on the planet, with a global population of more than half a billion. They happily exist almost everywhere - in forests, grasslands, tundra, coasts, farmland, scrubland, urban areas, mountains and wetlands.
While that’s nice for cat-lovers, it’s a huge problem for wildlife – due to cats’ natural hunting instinct, feral and domestic kitties kill tens of billions of birds and animals each year. In most countries, in fact, cats are the leading cause of bird deaths. In Australia alone, cats have driven at least 20 native mammals to extinction, and they’ve also been confirmed as the cause of the extinction of at least 33 other native species on islands throughout the world (this is likely to be a huge underestimate).
So while your cute lil kitty cat might be your loving companion and the source of countless smiles and snuggles, it's important to remember its wilder instincts, which cause big problems for other animals. It's up to us, as responsible owners, to take care of them and take steps to make sure they can't harm birds and other wildlife.
