Cats rule the Internet and scientists still scratching their heads trying to understand why but I think the mystery is part of the charm. A. To me, cats are an endless source of fascination because even through their domestication ( or did cat domesticate us?!), cats retain their independent personalities unlike dogs which have been fully breed and trained to serve us.
“You don’t own a cat. The cat own you.”
I understand the “dog people’s mentality”. I mean who can say no to unconditional love to devotion? but personally I feel that dogs are a bit too “needy”. Dogs constantly want your attention, they’re noisy, bark all the time, not cute (some are but not compare to cats), smells bad and go along with whatever you want. But when you have a pet cat, it’s a completely different game. Let’s talk a bit about history and the domestication of cat and dog.
According to historians, dogs are among the first animal to be domesticated by humans. They are believed to be descended from wild wolf that was captured and trained to be hunting aid and companions to us. Another theory is that wild carnies were drawn to the camp fire by the smell of food and stayed to scavenger the leftover, and when people noticed that they barked where there are danger nearby, we kept them with us. And after some estimated 10,000 years to domestication, we have successfully transformed the strong and mighty Direwolf of Winterfell into a Chihuahua.
The domestication of dogs have been so throughout and so fruitful that now there are over 300 breeds with vastly different characteristic from a huge Great Dane to a *ahem* tiny Pomeranian and everything in between: chubby Bulldogs with breathing issues, loyal German Sheppard, walking-cloud-of-happiness Samoyed, adorable short-legged Corgi, ferocious sheep herding, bear-killing Tibetan Mastiff, still-look-kinda-like-wolf Siberian Husky and Alaskan Malamute. The point is that dogs went through so much natural and selective breeding by human that they had been thoroughly transformed to suit our needs, be it for loyalty, aggressiveness, usefulness or purely aesthetic. In short, we literally made them our bitches.
But on the feline camp, it’s a similar story with a completely different ending. Scientists believe that after to the invention of agriculture that have enable human population to grow in closer proximity than traditional hunting and gathering, and the abundant of harvested crop attracted rodents and the cats followed them. Ancient civilization appreciated their help and tried to domesticated cats the same way they did with dogs and we all knew how that turned out.
Cats did followed and stayed with us but it’s due to the source of foods and protection we provided them. Basically they took advantage of us and domesticated themselves.
Extra reading:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/06/domesticated-cats-dna-genetics-pets-science/
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/ancient-egyptians-may-have-given-cats-personality-conquer-world
To be continue…
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