One of my rescues sneaked into the house on the heels of guests trying to smuggle himself into a home. ( twice) The other stood looking in the screen door 8 hrs a day for 3 weeks. I don’t think they really dug life in the wild.
It’s fine to keep a cat in a house. Hell, in my house my aunt keeps her cats in the verandah or a large cage so they won’t mess up the house.
So if a wild lion or cougar was captured, and had a kitten, could that kitten be trained from birth to live in a house? Just for the sake of the argument let’s say that the house is a scaled-up version of a normal house and the people living in it are giants, so they would be the same size in relation to the lion that we are to a housecat. But in all respects it is a normal house with normal rooms and everything, just gigantic and inhabited by giant people. Would their little lion grow up to basically behave the same as a domestic housecat would?
No. Domestication of wild animals isn’t all nurture, it can’t be done in one generation. It’s done through extended socialization and selected breeding. Cats and dogs and pigs have been bred for millennia to live with humans. That’s why they look nothing like their counterparts in the wild. Dogs especially were slowly socialized for a very long time before they were even domesticated; humans and wolves sharing the same hunting ground and getting used to each other long before they actually lived together.
I can’t argue with the rest of your post, but the African Wild Cat looks just like a little housecat.
My Himalayan, Marco, is an indoor cat and my constant and dearest companion. He goes out in the enclosed backyard garden with a harness and leash. He explores, sits in the sun, watches for field mice, and makes an occasional lame pounce at a bird. He’s never caught anything. There is no way in hell I would ever let him out to roam. Outdoor cats have a short life span, get hit by cars, are threatened by humans, and wreak havoc on birds and wildlife, get in fights with other cats (ever been faced with an abcess full of pus on your pet’s face?). Oh, and in the summer months Marco gets flea treatment purchased at great cost from the vet. If I ruled the world, well, I would decree all cat owners follow suit…
And this dingo looks just like my neighbor’s doggie, but I wouldn’t let him near my baby… looks can be deceiving.
Could a koala bear be kept as a pet? I have always wanted one; they are just the CUTEST ANIMALS EVER! They look just like John Adams. If I was to get a greenhouse with lots of eucalyptus trees for the little creature to eat, could it live with me? I get the impression koalas are pretty lazy and spend most of their time snoozling and snuggling.
Wikipedia says some areas in Australia are actually overrun with koalas; why don’t they just give some away? I read that some people have even suggesting hunting them to lower the population. How could anyone shoot a koala? I don’t have any problems shooting a rabbit, squirrel or duck, with their mindless, fixed facial expressions and lack of character, but a koala just has too much personality and cuteness for me to even consider it!
Jet Jaguar was abandoned and living outside when I took him in. He wanted to go out so badly I felt bad for him, but after he was fixed he got a bit calmer. He still wanted to roam, though. 2 years ago while I was living in Europe he managed to get out. I searched for him, put up signs with his picture all over town (in english and german) for 2 weeks. I was afraid we’d never see him again. He came back one night, dirty, beat up and skinny. He was literally half starved.
Since then he’s shown ZERO interest in going outside again. I guess he realizes that he’s better off in the house where he has food, water, shelter and companionship (there are three other cats in here with us)
I don’t think its unethical to keep a cat inside. Its only a bad thing when people get pets and don’t take care of them.
The African Wildcat may look like a domestic cat, and in fact according to the Wikipedia article is the ancestor of Felis domestica, but I wouldn’t expect it to domesticate, even from birth, as well as a common domestic cat, any more than a zebra foal would grow up to be as docile and trainable as a horse foal. In both cases, the millennia of breeding for affinity with humans makes a huge difference.
There are a number of domestic cat breeds – the Bengal, the Serengeti, and the Savannah, to name three – that have been created by careful outcrossing to wild species in order to get the wild look, but subsequent generations are equally carefully bred and crossed back into domestic cats in order to establish a people-friendly temperament along with the wild appearance.
The Ocicat and the Egyptian Mau both have the spotted “wild” coat pattern but are not the product of outcrossings to any wild species.
And indeed, the wild part of a Bengal is the Leopard Cat, which is undergoing in some areas what we think happened to the Domestic cat- they are being encouraged to hang around the village or farm and control rodents. Still wild, they are now becoming less shy of man in those areas.
Odesio- evn in my Oxford unabridged, there’s no such word as “clowder” and we really don’t need collective word for every species- in fact many of those we think of as correct were made up for a Victorian parlour game.
Our back yard has a good fence and hedge. Still, our cats can get out if they really, really try. They do so maybe twice a year, from what I can see. (I usually can see where they are)
So my cats can leave, but don’t. That makes it ethical to keep them.
I’m more worried about the ethics of feeding them meat from animals that can’t follow their natural inclination worth a damn (have you seen how chickens and pigs are kept in modern industrial farming), but I haven’t found a real solution to that yet. There is cat food from organic meat, but one of the cats can;t tolerate any other brand then we now have. Believe me, I have tried and clearing up cat diarrea for a week is no fun.
There are WAY more people that have exotic cats as pets in the U.S. than most people realize. I once read that there are more pet tigers in Texas alone than wild tigers in India. They are legal in most places. You can even buy tiger cubs and other exotic large cats online or from domestic breeders. They are cheaper than you would guess. The problem is that they obviously get very big as they grow up. You know how house cats sometimes go psychotic for no apparent reason and attack people including the owner? That is a much bigger problem when your house cat is a tiger or a cougar. I have read that the cheetah is the only large cat that is fairly safe around people.
Buy one yourself and let us know. You can start here: http://www.buytigers.com/
or here http://www.exoticcatz.com/
Google “exotic pets” for more resources. You can buy a tiger cub cheaper than many pure-breed dogs.
Why doesn’t the OP apply the same standard to human beings? By nature, human beings are supposed to be out in the wilderness, roaming the fields and woodlands and living in caves or trees, not cooped up in buildings with furniture and air conditioning and microwave ovens.
I think it can be unethical to keep a cat, depending on how you do it, but that typically it is not. They are not wild animals, they are evolved from a mideastern cat (see a recent interesting article in Scientific Evolution about the genetic origins of the housecat) that looks very similar to a brown tabby (which is the coat pattern that gradually wins out in a large population of random cats that breeds without any human selection forces aimed at coat pattern). They almost certainly evolved to eat table scraps and rodents attracted to human food storage and waste. Like humans, they have some range of preferences and instinctive drives and some confusion or conflict in some of these drives. But their typical preference is to associate with a human household and be somewhat dependent on humans and somewhat independent.
Cats are generally affectionate toward humans if we give them reason to be. Some researchers think that the residual psychological capacity to love mother cats and feel drawn toward them remains after kittenhood and this is the function that has evolved to attach cats to humans. Indeed, when I come home several of my cats swarm around me, putting their tails straight up when they get within about 6 or 8 feet, in the greeting that is first used by kittens approaching their mothers.
Cats are also typically somewhat affectionate toward one another, if they are part of the same social group. They do things like clean one another’s ears. Often they will greet one another with a raised tail or by bumping heads or touching noses. Multicat human households generally form stronger cat social groups, partly by humans spreading cat scents between group members by sequentially petting different cats.
I think many indoor-only cats do miss or wish for the outdoors, though outdoor cats generally have short and frightening and uncomfortable lives in comparison. Our cats can go freely indoors and outdoors. We have a flap-type cat door in the rear wall of the house. We also have about 3/4 acre fenced in, the fence effectively including the house, so they have outdoor space including a lawn, woods, a pole barn, gardens, a tiny pond, a deck, a brush pile full of varmints, and other niceties. There’s a 6’ stockade fence all around, to keep them in, and large round plastic tubing over the top of the fence, so that when they can jump to reach the top of the fence their tiny paws slip uselessly off.
I tend to agree with the folks that argue that domestic cats are members of a single variable species - Felis silvestris. Domestic cats are actually more closely related to F. silvestris lybica than it is related to any other population of F. silvestris ( i.e. domestic cats are closer to Near Eastern Wild Cats than Near Eastern Wild Cats are to European Wild Cats ).
But that aside, the hypothesis goes that the reason the African/Near Eastern Wild Cat was the one that was domesticated is in fact it is one of the easiest populations to tame who also happened to be in contact with one of the early stirrings of agricultural civilization. By contrast the European and Chinese populations, members of the same species, are much more difficult to tame. Such behavioral variability in different populations/subspecies of the same species is actually pretty common, as people who keep reptiles can readily attest.
But at any rate successfully taming an African Wild Cat is not the same as domesticating it. Pure breeds aside, even feral domestic cats have on average shorter legs, longer intestines and smaller brains than their wild relatives. They are very, very similar to their wild cousins, but they are no longer quite the same animal.
ETA: Squash, the cat second from the left, brother to Pumpkin, the second from the right, has fallen madly in love with every kitten that’s come into the household since his arrival, and lavished affection on, for example, Peanut (far right) and Schooner (far left).
Another reason a completely domesticated cat may try to get out of the door is curiosity – cats are notoriously nosy. Our’s, though, seem more interested in getting into the basement or the attic.
We have two kittens now that we have to worry about it, but other than that, our other cats haven’t tried to get outside, really. And it’s mostly because they want to explore.
As for attachments to people, Annie, the white one, is curled up beside me, with her head on my right hip, and her sister, Luci (the orange one), is sitting on my other side.
And quite a few of my cats have been kissers, and will licking your faces like a dog.
My cat, Buffy, used to “talk” to my sister when she’d call home from school. One day she climbed up beside my mother while Mom was talking to Baby Sis on the phone. When Buffy heard my sister’s voice, she got all excited and started crying and purring. Then, whenever my sister would call home, she’d have to “talk”, and she’d purr and rub up against the phone.
And haven’t you seen cats play favorites? (I’m Buffy’s, actually – she follows me upstairs when I go to bed)
EddyTeddyFreddy: aaawwwww
Another thought on cat-keeping ethics: The choice isn’t in a vacuum, it’s between keeping a cat and various other possibilities. I think it’s hard to justify supporting the pet store cat industry by buying one, but accepting a stray at your door or from an acquaintence or a shelter may need to be compared with letting the cat struggle in the wild or be euthanized. Most people would probably prefer a life that is boring or has multiple important irritating and annoying elements to being euthanized.
Napier: Spot on. All my tribe are rescues and shelter adoptees except for one, an adoption from an acquaintance (who got a polite but impassioned lecture on the need to spay his poor damn kitten-factory cat before she pumped out yet another litter). I will note in partial defense of pet stores that some will host adoption promotions by local rescues/shelters.
Guin: Awwwwwwwwwww…