this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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What's really interesting is to look at the time scale when each our pets were first domesticated. Dogs domestication happened between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, while the cat started becoming domesticted only 4000 years ago. Pretty crazy to think how much of a difference their is in the time it took each of them to become adaptive to human society. Makes you wonder what house cats will be like given the time frame dogs have had.
In some video, I recently watched (which may very well have been posted to Lemmy), it said that dogs had already gotten domesticated when we were still mostly hunters. We would take them onto hunts and then give them part of the hunted meat.
Cats, on the other hand, only got domesticated when we started doing agriculture, as they could hunt all the vermin much more effectively than a dog.
In particular, this also meant that cats did not need other food. You just kind of kept them around your village and they'd live their own life. That's probably a big part of why they hardly got domesticated, too.
I saw a video by Casual Geographic recently where he hit on the same thing. A lot of things about cats that differ from domesticated dogs and other animals are actually pretty advantageous to us.
They don't (usually) share their kills with us. If your cat is out there keeping the rodent population down, it's kind of nice that they keep that to themselves and don't share a bunch of useless, gross, carcasses with you.
They hunt independently. Kind of goes with the above, but again it's nice that they just have that on lock down and don't need you to be involved in them doing their jobs.
The reason we have them and not something like snakes is because first, they're not generally a threat to us, and also they are warm blooded and need to eat more than a cold blooded animal, which is also a benefit when keeping pest animals in check.
Basically we were like "hey these things are hungry little murder machines that are basically indifferent to us - let's keep them around."
The hungry little murder machine that murders my enemies is my friend.
And they have goofy faces
Yeah, that is exactly the video I watched. Thanks for the better summary.
Seems like it got posted here, for example: https://beehaw.org/post/7126747
I don't know exactly how many rodents my mauser kills, but it feels like the word "usually" is doing a lot of work here. I have had days when I've had to clean up three tiny corpses.
Yeah, some cats like to leave gifts to their servants as a reminder of what mighty hunters they are.
And one reason stray cats are so much more common than stray dogs is that cats are much less dependent on humans for survival.
Probably more of an asshole attitude
I'm sure there's asshole cats, I don't think I've met any. Well, maybe one.
But what I have met are a bunch of people that expect them to behave like dogs and don't get that cats work different.
There aren't that many asshole cats, but all cats are assholes sometimes.
Like people
All cats have assholes, not all assholes have cats.
Idonnoman, I know kids, huskies… and cats are like a mixture of kids and huskies, and fierce, and so curious that they appear silly. And then they steal the rice directly from the rice cooker and scream in between bites of hot rice….
The are little devils, for sure! But that's what we kinda love about them. I've only ever met one really insane cat. She was unfortunately never castrated and was constantly horny but never had a mating partner. She fucking slashed the shit out of her owner, who actually needed treatment in the hospital. The entire face was ravaged, never seen anything like this. Honestly, fuck that owner. Completely unfit to keep a pet. The poor cat had to be put down because she was completely messed up in the head :(
Based on how quickly behavioral and morphological changes happened in Soviet experiments on silver fox domestication, I suspect that domestic cats are about as domesticated as they're gonna get.
So in 16000 years humans will be fully domesticated by cats. I welcome our eventually cat overlords.
Cats were just waiting for humans to get their shits together
Honestly they don't need to go further they're perfect as they are. I like their semi(house)/full(stray) autonomy, frankly I respect them. Cats almost feel like adults, dogs (as much as I love them too I just don't want to own one) feel like smart (sometimes) children.
My cats are belligerent toddlers and not at all autonomous. Only one of the three could survive outside for more than a week. (Granted, the other two are "old" now so even if they weren't useless babies it would still be a statistical miracle for them to survive in the wild)
I take it they aren't strays then, with full autonomy, and are instead house cats with semi-autonomy, unless you're saying you make them poop on walks and sit and stay and all that.
Semi is giving them a lot of credit is what I'm saying. They'd starve to death if their food was in a paper bag instead of a bowl. One of them is afraid of the new curtains. Utterly useless. I love them but they are fully dependent on human care, much more than an average dog.
Lol mine wouldn't, I have to lock up the bread. Absolute monsters lol. They kill anything unlucky enough to get in.
So what you're saying is there should be much friendlier cats in the Warhammer 40K universe
I've seen some pretty pampered pussies owned by Korean youtubers that give me an idea what it would look like.
They will probably have domesticated us, instead of them.
They might be the only animal that actively chose to become domesticated.
"Choose" really isn't an applicable concept here, and even then dogs more likely stem from wolves hanging around of their own volition rather than kidnapped pups. And then there's honey bees.
Exactly the same as they are now.
Sadly people have started selective breeding in the 20th century and created plenty of mutilated breeds.