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With the development of agriculture, storage became vital and this attracted not only mice but rats. Cats were natural predators that help to control the ravages of the vermin that attacked the grain storage. Cats proved to be easy keepers and became indispensable to people becoming civilized.
The Egyptians gave them god status.
But during the dark ages of Europe, the cat became identified with evil and the devil and were persecuted resulting in the rat population flourishing to the point that when the bubonic fleas landed in Italy in circa 1342, allowing a plague to kill off one-third the people in Europe, 30,000,000 people, in just a couple of years.
Since then cats have once again become a symbiotic creature with humans.

In my neighborhood in N.Y. cats were detested. There were all these stories about them suffocating infants. throwing a cat off a roof top was not a big deal.

I was fortunate to be able and study a feral cat colony for many years out in the country. I noticed that about the time that the momma cats would bring in the kittens to learn to eat the dry cat food I put out, if you could pet a kitten, and believe me that was hard to do, it was like a connection was made between feline and human. The next time you saw the kitten it was more likely to let you touch it again. The more you touched, the more accessiable the kitten would become. By the time the kitten had grown large enough to have kittens of its own, you could repeat the process and the momma cat was not worried about what you were doing. Eventually you could pick the kitten up, but it would take nearly three generations to do so. We're not talking a long time period here, just under 18 months. It took an unbelievable amount of patience to do this, believe me. So, if a relationship started to exist between a human and a cat in which no harm came to the cat and the cat realized that no harm would come, it wouldn't take long for the cat to become totally acustomed to human touch. I think it is possible that a symbiotic relationship could have existed much earlier with mankind than what they think. But that's just my opinion.

The feral adult cats would never come close enough to touch and would run, however, since the barn and other out buildings provided shelter and good hunting, the cats stayed. I watched over 23 generations of wild cats before leaving the country to move into the city.

You have to admire the cats adaptability.

If ever I found someone mistreating a cat or any other animal, I would be very inclined to hurt them very badly if not kill the bloody idiots. Just because we human animals are the most predacious on the face of the earth means that we have the right to hurt or torture other animals. Those creeps really make may blood boil.

I'm fairly sure that these wildcats ("sand cats") are the kind discussed in the article:

One cold fall night at the ranch Mom heard cats yoweling on the back porch. We had house cats and barn cats and she thought that they were fighting. She grabbed a broom to so separate them. She went out on the back porch in the dark and started swatting at cats, focusing on a really big that turned and ran. As it did it was caught in the the light of the kitchen window and all she could see were tufts of fur on in its ears and a bobbed. She immediately retreated back into the kitchen and sat down with big round eyes and said "That was a Bob cat!"

Here is a little more on cats:

Interesting National Geographic vid, Dragon. Thanks for posting it.

yeah....thanks Dragao. It's in countries like this one where there are no natural enemies and everything sleeps at night are cats a perceived problem. Cats just don't kill for food. They kill for fun. It's their nature. That's what they do. Crocodiles eat. Sharks eat. Cats play.