Old one but worth repeating:
Dog: My hoomin pets me, feeds me, shelters me and loves me. They must be gods!
Cat: My hoomin pets me, feeds me, shelters me and loves me. I must be god!
And the cheezburgers.
Wow! That magazine has been around a looonnnnggggg time!
Yeah, that’s the worst citation for current thinking I’ve seen in a while.
And of course the Leopard Cat is the source of our hybrid domestic breed, the Bengal Cat :).
Kittens are a lot more sociable than adult cats in most feline species. I suspect at least some of the self-domestication process had a lot to do with neoteny.
Okay, I’ve read the Scientific American article I quoted above, and I’m confused about a point.
It says current thinking is that cats were domesticated/domesticated themselves 10,000-9,500 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, almost certainly concomitant with the rise of grain-based agriculture (and its mouse problem).
Then there’s a whole bunch of rather hastily laid out talk about cats migrating to Egypt 3,700 years ago and then spreading from Egypt to Greece and Rome and eventually going to Britain when the Romans did, although the article mentions there’s evidence that cats got to Britain before the Romans but that scholars cannot explain it.
What the heck?
If cats-living-with-humans started with the rise of what Jared Diamond calls the “suite” of the grain-based agriculture and associated other crops and domesticated animals, cats surely spread with that package of plant and animal domestication, which spread very rapidly. Certainly one would expect to find cats in each place humans employed the “Middle Eastern farming package,” because cats were part and parcel of grain storage.
And that farming package reached Europe, Greece, and Britain long before Roman expansion, didn’t it? So I don’t understand what the scientists are saying. Why would anyone think that cats would spread across the world to reach Egypt, then wait there a few thousand years, then spread out from Egypt to places that are right next to cat-having places that have had cats for thousands of years already? It makes no sense.
Because we can.
Yes, I own one, which is why I am up on what the Leopard cat does.
Because while the article answers the first half of the question (“How did cats get domesticated?”), it doesn’t discuss the second part (“Why cats, as opposed to owls, foxes, and snakes?”).
As per the OP asking why cats and not owls and foxes, I remember in Jared Diamond’s book he made the point that early civilization often made large efforts to domesticate practically all animals - and most animals just don’t take. As an example he mentions the elephant (still a work animal) and cheetah (used to be tamed by the hundreds for hunting in Egypt). These animals that have been regularily tamed for thousands of years but still are not domesticated. However, a few original species of small cats and the other domestic animals just happen to have characteristics that predispose them to it.
Asking why cats and not foxes is similar to asking why horses and not zebras.
Which is why the question at hand is wrong from the start. It is the human that is domesticated.
Our cat volunteered. He kept climbing up the screen door at breakfast time, and hung there asking for food and snuggles.
I didn’t think cats were technically domesticated.
I thought Rudyard Kipling covered this one.
Joke? Hard to tell with this crowd :).
But, yes - they’re domesticated, as the existence of numerous different breeds can attest.
I agree. I had the same issue when I read the article. But note that the article says cats reached Britain before the Romans, but supposedly was introduced to most of the rest of Europe by the Romans. I suspect that cats in fact did spread across Europe well before the Romans, but we may not have the evidence. Not everything gets included in the fossil record.
Because this is the Dope, dammit! 
As for the June 1009 issue of Scientific American… I don’t even bother to look at issues from before the Declaration of Independence.
Jeeze, half my posts inspire no comment at all, but make one little typo…
Sure. But the principle of parsimony would lead one to believe domesticated cats were introduced the same way in Europe as they were everywhere else – by diffusing with grain-based agriculture, and not by Marc Antony bringing pussy back to Rome (figuratively speaking). So I would expect scientists to be confident that was the case unless they found shocking evidence to the contrary.