Pussies galore! How cats are taking over the world Last year saw the launch of the first ever Internet Cat Video Film Festival in Minneapolis, which drew 10,000 people from all over the world. If this sounds bizarre, consider that the web's favourite cat, Maru, has his own YouTube channel that has attracted over 188 million views - double the number of the official White House video page. The cats" conquest of the internet isn't easily explained. Some experts believe cat owners - excused the responsibility of going for walkies or cleaning bird cages - simply spend more time on their computers. Others see a deeper explanation. Michael Newall, a professor of art history and philosophy at the University of Kent, argues that cats are masterly manipulators of human emotions, and the internet gives them the stage they always wanted. Those annoying cat habits, such as going into deep-dither mode on the doorstep as an icy gale blasts down your hallway, or running up the stairs just as you are coming down them with a paint tray, look much more fun when they happen to other people. "Cats are very expressive, so they are a perfect canvas for human emotions," says Ben Huh, founder of Cheezburger, one of the most popular cat-fan sites. Which makes them awesome. And, to an extent, makes them scary. There's no doubt that the cat ascendancy has many people worried. Some see the moggies as merciless stormtroopers - a kind of furred Reich - out to establish their superiority over dogs, budgies and hamsters. Not to mention their owners. What, they ask, did cats ever do for us? It's a reasonable question. Even the most active cat - a strictly relative term - is likely to spend about 85 per cent of its day doing absolutely nothing. Priority time allocations are made over to eating, scratching your furniture, mating, if possible, and standing close behind you as you step back from the stove carrying a giant wok of scalding Kung Bo lobster. Then it goes back to sleep. The two most severe indictments of cats as domestic animals are that they are primarily attached to places not people, and that they lack what anthropologists call "a specific utility." Which is to say they can't do anything that couldn't be done better by something else. But overcoming this absence of a role is part of the cat's genius. The creatures were around some time before us, but life in the wild was wearisome, and when the first human settlements appeared, wreathed in the whiff of roasted mastodon, the cats had the good sense to see their future. Admittedly, this involved doing a spot of work. In exchange for scraps and shelter, the cats chased off the rats, mice and birds. Over many centuries, an uneasy accommodation developed, whereby the humans gradually took over most of the tasks allocated to the cats, and the cats responded by sleeping more. By the time it became obvious - thanks to sanitation, pesticides etc - that we had no real need of cats, we had discovered an entirely new purpose for them. They entertained us, kept us company, treated us with healthy disdain, and made us appreciate that - as Freud famously said - "time with cats is never wasted." If cats are the coming species, it's hard to begrudge them the moment. The times we live in are less sociable, more self-fixated than most of us have known before, but cats have known little else, and now we may have to look to them for guidance. This will be the "specific utility" the beasts weren't supposed to have, and if they play it right it will be a big bonus for them. Like waking up and discovering you own a hotel on Mayfair.