As that great philosopher Homer J. Simpson once said, “Animals are crapping in our houses, and we’re cleaning it up. That’s not America! It’s not even Mexico!”
Seriously I’d say that we domesticated dogs, but cats (along with grass) domesticated us. And it’s worth noting, which the article doesn’t, that cat’s haven’t really been domesticated; they too have been tamed, and generally require taming from birth. Feral cats, after a certain age, regardless of their ancestry, will generally remain wild.
As the saying goes, dogs have owners, cats have staff.
I have two cats, and no mice.
No, the cats have a free range hunting ground and a live in games keeper. 😉
I have two spry mouse-hunting companions who let me have a fair share of the kills.
Do house spiders count as pets? My rationale for keeping them is that they eat insects.
They only count as pets if you name them.
Because sexual reproduction is overwhelmingly addictive.
Oh, -pets-. Because the two major chromosomal distributions of homo sapiens sapiens are just so bad at cross-communications they both seek cheap surrogates. Dogs provide absolute loyalty with minimal effort. Don’t ask me what cats are good for, I just don’t understand.
Cats can be quite loyal and affectionate. They require a greater investment of attention than Dogs abut can be equally loving.
Dogs become feral as well, so applying the same critera as cats they are just “tamed” as well. Packs of feral dogs roam the areas around Bakersfield CA and hunters find them a very wiley prey.
I didn’t say dogs couldn’t become feral. That’s a separate issue.
Ugh, lawns. I shake my head at people who think cats are fussy but happily spend hours every weekend caring for grass.
And have you seen how much poop lawns produce? Giant garbage bins full every week, gross!
Although she takes the exact center for herself, at least the cat is willing to let me sleep in my own bed, unlike my ex-wife.
Is there any evidence at all that cats or dogs have not always been domesticated? I know a family that had an actual wolf in their home. It had distinct traits from a house dog, but it was certainly domestic.
Egypt is famous for having even some big cats as house cats to the limits of recorded history.
Icemen themselves give evidence of being more advanced than they are often depicted.
It seems to me it would be pretty easy to make unverifiable assumptions about times long past.
Is there any evidence at all that cats or dogs have not always been domesticated?
IIRC with dogs, evidence of domestication goes back 40,000 years. So that is about 1/5 of always for modern humans but also pretty much always for our modern construct of humanity.
Egypt is famous for having even some big cats as house cats to the limits of recorded history.
The guy who writes one of the anthro blogs I read noted that cats might have had a special place in the hearts of Egyptians but not quite how people today interpret that. They were sacred, meaning there was an entire industry built around cat sacrifices.
If I were younger, I’d try to replicate the Russian silver fox experiment with cats. The cats we have now are nice, but cats deliberately bred to be friendly to humans would be awesome.
Interesting link. So the traits definitely pre-existed in the wild animals. It did not require mutation and happened rapidly (relative to evolutionary time frames.)