By “domesticated”, I mean “able to live with humans and passably sociable”, not “fetches your slippers for you”.
All the other major types of domestic animals come from herds or packs. Your dog listens to you because he’s programmed to obey the alpha, and you happen to be his alpha. A horse gets along with people because in the wild she’d get along with other horses.
Cats don’t fit into the picture here. Wild cats are notorious loners. They sure as heck don’t have any instincts forcing them to follow the leader. But somehow, pet cats are able to form deep bonds with humans. (My Tivka might as well have been named Fido; it’s almost embarrassing the way she fawns over me). Where did this companionability come from? Did Felis domesticus suddenly wake up one day and say, “Hey, I think I’ll become a social animal today”?
Years of artificial selection (humans choosing generation after generation of the ideal cat for indoor confinement) combined with those same cats reaping the benefit from the safety of living in the humans’ shelters, being provided with an almost constant source of comfort food, medication and even veterinary care when ill.
It’s more of a symbiotic relationship now with humans providing the cat with sustenance. In return, cats provide the companionship that is desired by humans.
To the contrary, current thinking suggests it was more a matter of cats habituating humans to care for them than humans selecting for cats willing to live with them. See, for example, The Evolution of House Cats from the June, 1009 Scientific American.
To clarify my OP- owls catch mice. Foxes catch mice. But we don’t have owls and foxes waiting at home on the couch for us. What made cats make the leap?
Sometimes I wonder just how domesticated cats are. Sometimes I’ll see a show about other cats and the body language is so similar to every housecat I’ve ever know that it’s a bit scary.
I know my Sapphire has got me trained. She yells at me, I give her food. What self-respecting cat wouldn’t go for a deal like that?
I suspect that Toxoplasmosis has a lot to do with it. T gondii needs to get from rats to cats, and it does so by making rats less fearful of cats. When the rats moved in the with the people, T gondii was able to keep reproducing by making sure the people liked cats too.
More to the point, rats eat grain. Get cats, less waking up one winter to find your silo has been emptied from within and you’re starving.
And cats took less domesticating than most animals, since what we want them to do is pretty much what they do anyway. Chasing gophers through holes or herding sheep isn’t what wolves do naturally, so we had to do a good bit of selecting on them to make them suitable for those jobs (and in that, we were aided by wolves’ natural pack tendencies). But a wild cat will mouse as well as a “tame” one, so if you want mousers, you’re already there.
So, folks, we’ve got two citations to a recent Scientific American ariticle which is more comprehensive than you can imagine, and yet folks are still speculating? Why?
Feral cats will live in colonies ( or more accurately will congregate in them temporarily ) if the food supply is sufficient to defuse tensions and is centrally located so that socializing is necessary - this occurs mostly in cities. So they’re facultatively social at least.
However wild cats seem not to share this habit. The wild food supply is probably never ample enough for it to make sense. It might be a genetic behavioral difference, derived from hundreds of generations of taming or it might be a potential trait of any Near Eastern Wildcat and they just never have much need to express it.
Great question! I’d like to point out that the dog-human relationship isn’t simply “dogs obey the alpha.” Dogs have many other instincts that come from being social animals, instincts that happen to be surprisingly human-like (despite rather disparate evolutionary history), and because of them we bond mutually. (We pretend they’re humans, they pretend we’re dogs.) Moreover, wolves have pretty much the same instincts. Cats, meanwhile, started out as antisocial freaks even if anyone would like to argue they’re not still.
I had a theory that because cats don’t fall into our social hierarchy and don’t perceive us as awesome, they don’t act socially inferior (the way dogs do). Their detachedness makes them seem, literally, cooler.
Because the SciAm article is speculating too. And it can take our speculation from our cold dead hands.
Actually, not all of them are. Notorious loners couldn’t exactly band together to form a pride of lions, a leap of leopards, or a clowder of cats. Even domesticated house cats are social animals as demonstrated by the Hemingway House & Museum house. They form their own little social structures and everything.
Well, there’s the Asian Leopard cat, closely related to the domestic cat. It’s a wild animal. But sometimes, the cats will take up living alongside humans because of the nice selection of rodents, and the protection from larger carnivores. Smart humans encourage this, and maybe even leave out some scraps at times.
I suspect if you take 5000-10000 years of that, add in the human propensity of “oooh, isn’t it cute” for baby animals, which would then be taken in, and you end up with the house cat.
