Following on from http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=288031
Mankind has domesticated cats and dogs for a very long time. Now I can understand why creatures like the (mountain) lion, and the tiger have not been domesticated - they’re physically bigger predators than us etc - but why not the medium-sized cats like the cheetah?
My WAG–no antelope problem in our granaries. Part of the driving force behind the domestication of the cat was curbing the rodent problem in our cities and storehouses, which wouldn’t lend itself to a larger predator like a cheetah.
Animals are very difficult to domesticate. Generally, they need to have a social structure that makes it easy for us to manipulate them (a la dogs, cows, etc.). The other thing for many animals (esp. carnivores, like housecats) would seem to be long-term proximity to humans. Small cats were likely scavenging from humans for millennia, and so their natural fear of man was lower. Frankly, I imagine that, in a few hundred years, we could also domesticate (not just tame) raccoons, skunks, squirrels, etc.
Of course, you can argue over whether some animals are domesticated or not, and what we want to use as a definition for domestication (I don’t have Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel handy…). For example, mice and rats are widely kept as pets and have been close to humans forever … but are they really domesticated? Some can be trained, some can’t. And if we were to vanish, most of them (minus the immuno-compromised lab rats) would do just fine in the wild. Ferrets won’t. Cattle, so-so. But horses will, cats will, dogs will …
Plus, even a medium sized cat can do some serious damage. Considering how tempremental even domesticated cats are in general, is it really wise to have a cheetah romaing around your house?
I think it’s because cats are only partially domesticated. They’re not really trainable like dogs and even the gentlest house cat will sometimes have irrational, “frisky” moods. A bigger cat would be much more likely to hurt someone.
Fair enough, but why not breed them that way? We’ve been able to breed dogs from very large to very small, but house cats are all generally the same size. Is there just a lack of interest on our part, or do cats not have the same ease of genetic manipulation that dogs do?
As long as we are WAGging, cats are not quite as domesticated as dogs. Dogs are routinely trained to not bite. I have not met a housecat yet who has not occasionally let loose with a bite when he was annoyed. A playful bite from a 14 lb cat is one thing, a playful bite from a lynx sized or larger cat would be another thing entirely.
A cheetah’s still 110 to 140 pounds. It would be expensive to feed, and I don’t think my neighbors would like losing their pugs as afternoon snacks.
Plus, I’m convinced that the only reason housecats don’t eat us is that they’re too little. I don’t think any cat is truly domesticated - they just put up with us because we keep the food coming and we’re not worth the effort.
I do have friends with very very large “housecats.” One is part Maine Coon and is 35 pounds of muscle. He eats a $15 bag of cat food in about four days. Another friend has an African wildcat that was illegally and mistakenly sold as a tabby. She’s about 23 pounds. The pet store near here has a bobcat someone left on their stoop, but they won’t sell him. He’s very friendly to customers, and likes to climb me like a tree when I go in.
Only one kind of cat has ever been domesticated - the North African Wild Cat. And it may well not have been domisticated deliberately, but rather through a process of commensalism. Wild cats began hanging around human granaries to feed on the rodents they attracted, and eventually became tame.
Tame cheetahs and the caracal (or desert lynx) were sometimes used to hunt game, but never have become truely domesticated.
Most domestic animals are social animals, and humans were able to co-opt their social systems to domesticate them. Most cats, with the exception of the lion, are essentially solitary, and this makes them harder to domesticate.
Cheetahs have been ‘domesticated’ in several parts of North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East at several times in history. They were kept as part of the household livestock and trained to hunt prey, being used rather like large whippets to run down medium sized prey like antelope.
Diamond actually mentions this in Guns, Germs and Steel. He also points out that cheetahs can’t be bred in captivity because of their bizarre marathon courtship ritual. All ‘domesticated’ cheetahs were captured in the wild as cubs and hand reared. And that explains why the practice of keeping cheetahs as pets and hunting animals died out. To have domestic cheetahs you need lots of wilderness for wild cheetahs to live in. Once a civilisation reached a critical population density the wild cheetahs vanished. They were killed for preying on domestic animals, their wild prey was displaced by domestic herds and environmental change. Once there was no more wilderness there was no longer any source of cheetahs for domestication.
As for why we don’t breed domestic cats bigger, it’s largely been because there has never been any need or desire to do so.
People bred mastiffs because they wanted dogs that could kill people or bring down deer, and to do that the dog needed to be big. People bred terriers because they wanted a dog that could chase burrowing prey animals and vermin. There has never been any such pressure on cats because cats have never been used in that way. Cats were encouraged because they preyed on rodents. That’s all they’ve ever really been used for. The ideal cat form for preying on rodents is the one that evolution had already produced even before humans evolved. There has never been any need to modify it. The same is not true of dogs because dogs are used to do all sorts of things that domestic wolves never needed to do.
The changes that have been bred into cats have almost all been done for cosmetic reasons., not practicality, and they’ve almost all been achieved very recently. People have been breeding for mastiff and terrier traits for millennia, they’ve only been breeding for cat traits for a few centuries.
That’s a highly suspect statement. The same species has a huge range extending over much of Europe and Asia and there has undoubtedly been constant inflow of genes form wildcats into domestic cat populations that confuses the issue. Whether cats were domesticated only once in North Africa/Middle East and spread out from there to breed with local wildcats or whether there was multiple domestications in various parts of the world is still very much open to question. Most of the evidence to date supports multiple domestications. That is also the most logical conclusion since, as you point out, it’s really just a process of commensalism. The idea that wildcats living near agricultural villages in china for some reason never entered the village seems highly improbable, as does the idea that they entered but the people never encouraged them to hang around.
It’s also the sheer multitude of natural weapons that cats have. It’s not too hard to protect yourself from an overly playful dog. But cats can twist all four legs behind their back, and turn their head around to bite almost any area around their body. You have five legitimate threats to worry about if you are trying to restrain a cat. A cat is also faster than you. If you touch a cat’s tail, it can turn around and swat you with it’s front claws before you can react.
What specific evidence supports multiple domestications, as opposed to just introgression of genes from local populations into domestic stock derived from the North African population?
Also, cats are the only “domesticated” carnivores. (I really wouldn’t call them domesticated, either - they’re definately not like a dog or a cow.) You’d have to be awfully rich to be able to afford to feed a cheetah for generations to domesticate the thing - every so often an individual might choose to take on the expense, but not for generation upon generation. A barn cat kills its own food, but like somebody else said, there’s not a big antelope problem in our granaries.
It has been done recently in a wildlife preserve in Australia. The zoologists observed cheetah behaviour in the wild; separated the sex’s and; set up a ‘catwalk’ for the males’ display.
Well, the only ones other than dogs…
Well, actually, according to The Character of Cats by Stephen Budiansky, there is a growing consensus that the European, African and Asiatic wildcats are all the same species.
As I’ve already pointed out there is no such expense. Wild caught cheetahs were kept as hunting animals and they paid for themselves, at least for the nobility. There’s no need for generations of breeding to produce a productive animal, even wild caught specimens are effective.
Mason, Evolution of domesticated animals. 1988
“Recent discoveries of cat remains associated with Neolithic human burials in Cyprus, Central Iran and Northern China suggest independent domestication in these locales.”
And since we’re playing the “Cite!” game Colibri, can we please have a reference for your claim that only the North African wildcat has ever been domesticated? Not a refernce that says that they have been domesticated, but that the North African population is the only population of cat to ever be domesticated.
And ferrets.
That’s why I specifically stressed that point in that post by saying “The same species has a huge range extending over much of Europe and Asia”. I don’t think there’s much doubt that the North African wildcat Colibri refers to is the same species as the Southern African wildcat or the Chinese wildcat or whatever. But evidence suggests that different kinds of that species aside from the North African kind have been domesticated.
I’ve always been told that dogs are less carnivorous than cats - a dog can go vegitarian, for example. My dog is pretty omnivorous, like a person.
Yeah, but “effective” is not the same thing as “domesticated”. There’s a big difference between a tame animal and a domesticated one. You can tame a raccoon or a cheetah or a chimp, but that dosen’t make it domesticated.
Quite true. But that’s not the point. The point is that because cheetahs are perfectly effective hunters in the first generation there is no expense associated with domesticating them.
Housecats weren’t domesticated in one generation either, but that didn’t make them expensive to domesticate and exactly the same would be true of cheetahs if they could be bred in captivity. It’s that inability (until recently apparently) to get them to captive breed that prevented domestication, not expense.