What is it about cats that makes them such good house pets?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpetcats.html

“given how little practical purpose most of them serve) as cats and dogs”

I have to refute the context of this… Most urban dwellers probably own animals for the sheer companionship of them (as myself), but many that I’m aquianted with own them soley for their practical purposes.

Take dogs for example… Many people own them for hunting ability alone. They are able to retreive down birds, point to nested birds, flush sitting birds, and trail or tree small game. Hunting in any of these aspects would not be likely without the assitance of canines, and is often diffucult or unsuccessful without their aid, if not impossible without their perceptive nose. While you may see hunting as “non-practical”, it’s a daily occurance for quite a few people, and is the sole reason for owning dogs amongst most of them.

Additionally, dogs can be trained to defend their territory for security purposes, and are also a tremendous asset to the disabled in countless ways.

Cats as well serve a practical purpose as natural rodent control, in addition to the aforementioned companionship (which I deem as ‘practical’, multiple millions of pet lovers will second this).

There never has been a better mouse trap such as the cat. If you’d take the time to frequent just about any small farm (try it sometime, it’s nice to know where your food comes from if nothing else), you’ll find the occurance of “farm cats”, which are more or less unkempt cats that any farmer welcomes as a natural predator to rats, birds, mice, and other farm dwelling pests that can damage, devastate, or soil any number of crops/feed/milk.

Indeed, MANY domesticated animals DO serve a “practical purpose” and are still kept for that sole reason, albeit not in Central Park.

So, point in case, please clarify on “practical” or cite your references in the future, becuase many domesicated animals are bred, bought, cared for, or allowed to exist for “practical” purposes which humans alone cannot acheive without their assistance…

2

I’d have to go a bit further and disagree with the premise of the question entirely. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that cats can make terrible housepets…much worse than dogs. My last roommate had two cats who shredded the window blinds, peed on every carpet in the house, tore up the couch and the armchair, climbed the screens, ate the plants, shed EVERYWHERE and carried off anything that suited them, such as pens, hairbrushes, or defrosting chicken breasts.
In that same time period, my dog had one “accident” in the house, when she was on medication and was left inside all day while I was at work, and then she peed on the linoleum floor in the bathroom. She shed much less than the cats because I was able to give her regular baths, and she was TRAINED not to steal food or other stuff, etc.
Now, I have owned cats that were better behaved than that, and I’ve seen dogs that are much worse. But I think perhaps the qualities that make a “good housepet” are the qualities we train into our animals. Dogs are easier to train than cats, so I say…

DOGS ARE THE BEST!!!

3

Cats are God’s greatest achievement in the field of satire. What more is there to say?

4

Cats are extremely good hunters. Even cuddly, flat faced infant-like resource gobblers who have never even seen the wilds of a city park will instinctively hunt. Rodents seem to know this.

In the urban jungle, this is indispensible. My downstairs neighbor has a dog— and mice. I have two cats and was shocked when he asked if we had mice. So I have to disagree with Doug’s parenthetical when he said:

At least when it comes to cats.

5

They seem to keep the spiders (ewwww) down, too … which to my mind makes them worth their weight in gold. :smiley:

Julie

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Not at Mom’s house. At any given time, she’s sharing the house with 3-4 cats and umpteen many spiders, and I’ve never seen any sort of conflict of interest between the four-legged and eight-legged hunters.

7

Not at Mom’s house. At any given time, she’s sharing the house with 3-4 cats and umpteen many spiders, and I’ve never seen any sort of conflict of interest between the four-legged and eight-legged hunters.

8

Cats are no more “extremely good” at being hunters than any other predatory animal that’s made it this far down the evolutionary chain. Cats have this reputation because people have observed that solitary cats left to their own devices in the wild seem to do okay for themselves whereas dogs have a much tougher time. That’s because the primary prey for cats are birds and rodents - plentiful in areas where people live. Dog, on the other hand, aren’t really built for the type of prey that can coexist with humans very well. Not only that, they’re pack hunters (one of the few predators that regularly take down prey larger than themselves.) For a dog to hunt efficiently, it has to join a pack, something you don’t see too often here in the developed world.

Like most pests, if your downstairs neighbor has mice, you have mice, too - they’re just a lot less bold in your apartment.

9

I have a theory that cats were essential to the development of civilization as we know it.

Getting civilization off to a start in the early days, as we all know from Toynbee 101, required a buildup of surplus food supply. However, the grain storage that is the essential step in civilizational economics is unfeasible and frustrating when your stores are plagues by rodent infestation. They eat up half your surplus and poop in the remainder.

Without cats to keep the rodents under control, Egyptians never would have been able to accumulate the resources that powered their development of one of the world’s earliest brilliant civilizations. It was the Egyptians more than anyone who taught the arts and sciences of civilization to the rest of the world (granted, the Mesopotamians were a close second, and they no doubt got domesticated cats from Egypt). Dogs were fine as far as the hunter-gatherer stage of humanity went, but there would have been no civilization as we know it without the cat.

No wonder the Egyptians worshiped cats as gods.

10

Cats are extremely good at hunting. And they enjoy it. Unlike most hunters, they seem to do it just for fun.

Because my mice went to obedience school? I have the mice with the meek gene? I have no mice. There is no evidence of mice. No droppings, no scurring in the night-- nothing.

If you were talking about roaches, then you would have a point. If your neighbors have roaches, then you’ve got them too. It does not work that way with mice.

11

To continue my defense of cats as rodent control–
NYS Pest Management Program thinks a good way to get rid of house mice is to:

Now, if you already have a really bad mouse problem, getting a cat will help but probably won’t solve your problem alone,but they can and do prevent infestation. Dogs will catch mice too, but a well-fed canine? That dog won’t hunt.

12

To the poster that said dogs are better than cats. All that proves is any ONE animal can be good or bad. (or in that case any two animals).

Cats make good pets because they are very loyal and easy to care for.

Cats loyalty tend to be directed at ONE person in a household. They have their favourites. Dogs tend to favour a group. That is a cat may rebuff individuals in a household but are very attached to one person in it. Dog seem to like everyone in a household.

As for mousing. Most mice simply won’t tolerate a cat and will not live where one is.

I have found dogs and cats to be about equally smart but dogs learn more readily. In other words you have to hammers something into a cat’s brain whereas a dog is more apt to please.

13

In my experience, this is true, except that the one person in question generally has four legs and fur.