What’s really interesting is to look at the time scale when each our pets were first domesticated. Dogs domestication happened between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, while the cat started becoming domesticted only 4000 years ago. Pretty crazy to think how much of a difference their is in the time it took each of them to become adaptive to human society. Makes you wonder what house cats will be like given the time frame dogs have had.
In some video, I recently watched (which may very well have been posted to Lemmy), it said that dogs had already gotten domesticated when we were still mostly hunters. We would take them onto hunts and then give them part of the hunted meat.
Cats, on the other hand, only got domesticated when we started doing agriculture, as they could hunt all the vermin much more effectively than a dog.
In particular, this also meant that cats did not need other food. You just kind of kept them around your village and they’d live their own life. That’s probably a big part of why they hardly got domesticated, too.
I saw a video by Casual Geographic recently where he hit on the same thing. A lot of things about cats that differ from domesticated dogs and other animals are actually pretty advantageous to us.
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They don’t (usually) share their kills with us. If your cat is out there keeping the rodent population down, it’s kind of nice that they keep that to themselves and don’t share a bunch of useless, gross, carcasses with you.
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They hunt independently. Kind of goes with the above, but again it’s nice that they just have that on lock down and don’t need you to be involved in them doing their jobs.
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The reason we have them and not something like snakes is because first, they’re not generally a threat to us, and also they are warm blooded and need to eat more than a cold blooded animal, which is also a benefit when keeping pest animals in check.
Basically we were like “hey these things are hungry little murder machines that are basically indifferent to us - let’s keep them around.”
Yeah, that is exactly the video I watched. Thanks for the better summary.
Seems like it got posted here, for example: https://beehaw.org/post/7126747
They don’t (usually) share their kills with us. If your cat is out there keeping the rodent population down, it’s kind of nice that they keep that to themselves and don’t share a bunch of useless, gross, carcasses with you.
I don’t know exactly how many rodents my mauser kills, but it feels like the word “usually” is doing a lot of work here. I have had days when I’ve had to clean up three tiny corpses.
Makes you wonder what house cats will be like given the time frame dogs have had.
Probably more of an asshole attitude
I’m sure there’s asshole cats, I don’t think I’ve met any. Well, maybe one.
But what I have met are a bunch of people that expect them to behave like dogs and don’t get that cats work different.
There aren’t that many asshole cats, but all cats are assholes sometimes.
Idonnoman, I know kids, huskies… and cats are like a mixture of kids and huskies, and fierce, and so curious that they appear silly. And then they steal the rice directly from the rice cooker and scream in between bites of hot rice….
Based on how quickly behavioral and morphological changes happened in Soviet experiments on silver fox domestication, I suspect that domestic cats are about as domesticated as they’re gonna get.
Honestly they don’t need to go further they’re perfect as they are. I like their semi(house)/full(stray) autonomy, frankly I respect them. Cats almost feel like adults, dogs (as much as I love them too I just don’t want to own one) feel like smart (sometimes) children.
My cats are belligerent toddlers and not at all autonomous. Only one of the three could survive outside for more than a week. (Granted, the other two are “old” now so even if they weren’t useless babies it would still be a statistical miracle for them to survive in the wild)
I take it they aren’t strays then, with full autonomy, and are instead house cats with semi-autonomy, unless you’re saying you make them poop on walks and sit and stay and all that.
They might be the only animal that actively chose to become domesticated.
No wait, they’re going outside again.
If it was raining when my parents cat wanted to go out the back door he’d go to the front to see if it was raining there too.
You know those species of birds that will lay their eggs in the nests of other species of birds so that someone else will raise them and take care of them?
That’s what cats did, but they domesticated us. All those people who “couldn’t say ‘no’ to that little face :3” have been domesticated… myself included.
You obviously have a vast collection of content. Make a post and share how you keep it organised, where it comes from etc
Think that would interest people? I’ve thought about writing up a “One year of posting to Lemmy” post now that I’ve been doing this pretty much daily for a full year. Maybe if I do, I could include this.
For a while, I thought ‘The Picard Maneuver’ was a Community with how often I would see your posts. Please do.
If you do, please cross-post it to !fedigrow@lemm.ee.
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Cats, where did they go? Inside!
Where did they sleep? Everywhere!