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.
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.
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.
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."
And they have goofy faces
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.
And one reason stray cats are so much more common than stray dogs is that cats are much less dependent on humans for survival.
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.
So in 16000 years humans will be fully domesticated by cats. I welcome our eventually cat overlords.
Cats were just waiting for humans to get their shits together
So what you're saying is there should be much friendlier cats in the Warhammer 40K universe
I've seen some pretty pampered pussies owned by Korean youtubers that give me an idea what it would look like.
They will probably have domesticated us, instead of them.
They might be the only animal that actively chose to become domesticated.
"Choose" really isn't an applicable concept here, and even then dogs more likely stem from wolves hanging around of their own volition rather than kidnapped pups. And then there's honey bees.
Exactly the same as they are now.
No wait, they're going outside again.
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.
toxoplasmosis has entered the chat
If toxoplasmosis is wrong, I don't want to be right.
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.
Ha, it's just me!
Definitely want to see this!
Really they just evolved to be friendlier and more tolerant of humans, they don't even have to live inside per se.
If i compare my 7 pure-indoor-cats and my 2 "found outdoors abandoned by mom cat at about 8 weeks age"-cats over my lifetime(not all at the same time ofc! i'm neither masochistic nor a cat hoarder), they had completely different stances towards humans; the 8 weeks without humans didn't make the "foundlings" unfriendly per se, but far less "human bullshit"-tolerant.
i suspect there's more nurture than nature going on here, but i have not enough resources for a double-blind study with n=500, especially regarding bed space and hands.
Both of my cats came from my inlaws farm where they're fed but largely not socialized. They both needed to learn that humans are worth keeping around and give good pets and rubs.
Best part is, the cats that came from the farm are great at killing the couple of mice that make it into the house in the fall when it starts getting cold, so we don't have the mouse problem we might otherwise find ourselves with
Well their brains also shrunk because they got us to do some of the thinking necessary to keep them alive.
And now...
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