Well, of course, Cal. Can’t let all that meat turn, can you? We’d go bad in a hurry lying out on the couch like that.
Well, that is just perfectly terrifying.
Luckily, most people who have it don’t need treatment.
Domesticity has something to do with it, but the base animal they started from was very different. Dogs / wolves / canines of a sort are pack animals. they follow the leader, and have a hierarchical instinct; basically, most humans replace the alpha male pack leader in the instincts of dogs, so they follow, do what we say, etc. We have co-opted some of their instincts; herding sheep etc. is an offshoot of the chase-prey instinct. Territorial defense and defense of the master are instinctive.
Cats are typically solitary animals. (The major exception I can think of being lions - they come in family packs). As a result they are not followers, they do not look up to us as “leader of the pack” and follow us around waiting to be told their role. When they were selected, the selection was for chasing mice, which did not require much deviation from their wild role.
As for breeds - I recall some discussion that the genetics of dogs and how they develop allowed for some interesting variations - daschunds for example the legs did not get the same “grow” signal as the rest of the body. OTOH cats don’t seem have this excessive variability in their genetic makeup; funny fur or pug face seems to be the limit of our ability to mold their appearance.
Your parenthetical remark seems to be implying that rodents are not social animals. This is not true for all rodents; definitely false for rats. They do best when living with other rats and become very lonely if others are not available (having a lone pet rat is a very bad idea).
I have the most personal experience with rats, but I understand that hamsters have a completely different social structure, and indeed are not social at all.
If I died, my rats would unfortunately be trapped in their cage and wouldn’t be able to eat me. 
We have two cats raised from day old kittens by us. They truly love us, follow us around, want to be near us. However, they are the exception.
I have had a pet rat and a pet ferret, and yes, they can be affectionate also, but not like a good dog.
So, to actually answer the OP, dogs- in general- are indeed more loving, loyal and affectionate than most other pets.
Cats are in there with other common pet mammals, but there are exceptions.
This link says that cats don’t like surprises, and will make sure prey is dead before starting to eat it. It’s canines you have to worry about.
No I was saying that while rats may be social, their status as domesticated is a bit blurry as opposed to just tamed. It might be that the comparison with cats and sociability is limited to species of a similar or greater taxonomic rank.
I don’t think it is actually true that cats in the wild were “completely asocial”.
Cats are not pack animals like dogs, and they do not cooperate in hunting, but feral and wild cats definitely congregate together in loose “colonies” based mainly on the mother-kitten bond, often over several generations.
Just as humans have hijacked the pack behavior of dogs for their own uses, they have also made use of the partly-social nature of cats: in the wild, cats prefer to hang out with other cats over being solitary (and so your pet cat may prefer hanging out with you). It also explains why cats have such a wide variety of communication strategies with people: in their social groups, these wee necessary as between cats.
Many of the behaviors cats display (purring, “kneading” their owners) are exactly those behaviors kittens display with their mothers (or other ‘queens’).
Feral cats are not wildcats, and feral cats seem to only congregate in packs when they’re in large numbers with abundant food (such as you see in urban areas). Wildcats and feral cats in rural locations disperse and establish individual territories that may overlap some but are fiercely defended the closer to the center one gets. Yes kittens hang around for several months, but they tend to disperse after reaching sexual maturity. I think the co-habitating and communal rearing of kittens is limited mainly to feral cats.
So why are cats so afraid of cucumbers, then?
My last two cats were very different. One of them exhibited typical cat behavior. She was standoffish and didn’t want attention, except sometimes and then she would DEMAND it, by slashing ankles if necessary. (“Pet me, pet me, pet me, okay that’s enough now I’m gonna bite you.”) She was rarely to be found in the daytime and prone to crazy cat behavior at night. Climbing the curtains, massacring* socks.
The other one was mellow and almost doglike. He would go on walks me with and the dog. (Dog on leash, cat not on leash.) He preferred to be around people, and he liked to curl up in bed with the rest of us at night so yeah, I was sleeping with a man, a dog, and a cat. I had to give up some of my pillows.
These two cats would interact with each other, and they would gang up together against the dog, but I wouldn’t say they were friends. They both liked to walk across the computer keyboard. One just did it during the daytime and the other one did it at night.
What I’m saying is, they were very different, but all in the range of catlike behavior because, as they were cats, everything they did was catlike behavior. When the first one, the little she-devil, died, the remaining cat got much, much clingier, and now that he’s gone to his final rest I think the dog misses both of them.
*This word…looks wrong.
I tried that with my cat once and she wasn’t the least bit interested. It probably looks like a snake at first I guess?
Well, here goes, both my cats at this very moment are clung to me like another skin. We turned the air conditioning on last week. They are decidedly unhappy about it. And this has brought out some weird clingy behaviours. They usually camp out on cat trees, cat beds or on the top of the dryer. I don’t recall this happening last year. I am almost ready to call a cat psychiatrist. My daughter has decided the aircondition unit maybe emitting a sound we can’t hear but they can. IDK, it doesn’t stay on all the time. I hope they are just cold, I can fix that. These cats are very aloof, and oh so snooty Siameses. It’s really unnatural for them to be clingy. And that’s what worries me the most. They don’t like me this much, they tolerate me because I am the food committee.
Heh, this is the problem with relying on secondary sources - nuance is lost.
In fact, the actual social behavior of the African Wild Cat (the likely closest relation of the domestic cat) is simply not well known, because they are small, shy hunters.
Evidence suggests, however, that they can behave exactly like their feral cousins: the females are more likely to cluster together. Radio-collar studies show that female ranges overlap, while male ranges do not. The paper below concludes that they are, perhaps, ‘weakly social’ - like feral cats, though there are no “colonies” unlike feral cats - but the evidence is very thin either way: “These observations could be interpreted as a weak form of sociality in wild cats that could manifest itself more strongly under different ecological conditions”.
Problem is, of course, that it is really, really tough to observe the fleeting social behavior of shy, wild mostly-nocturnal carnivores, even by dedicated scientists!
In short, there is (as one may expect) social tendencies in wild cats, that can (and do) manifest themselves “under different ecological conditions”, of which feral-ness is one example, and domestication another and more extreme example.
Despite questions whether cats form some sort of “hives”, they definitely don’t typically hunt in large packs like wolves or other canines; and even when you gather them in a group, they are apparently notoriously difficult to herd.