this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
830 points (98.0% liked)

Comic Strips

12454 readers
3427 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 68 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

I've seen some pretty pampered pussies owned by Korean youtubers that give me an idea what it would look like.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

Cats were just waiting for humans to get their shits together

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

So in 16000 years humans will be fully domesticated by cats. I welcome our eventually cat overlords.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

So what you're saying is there should be much friendlier cats in the Warhammer 40K universe

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Exactly the same as they are now.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Sadly people have started selective breeding in the 20th century and created plenty of mutilated breeds.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 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)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Lol mine wouldn't, I have to lock up the bread. Absolute monsters lol. They kill anything unlucky enough to get in.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

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."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah, some cats like to leave gifts to their servants as a reminder of what mighty hunters they are.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

And they have goofy faces

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

The hungry little murder machine that murders my enemies is my friend.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago

And one reason stray cats are so much more common than stray dogs is that cats are much less dependent on humans for survival.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They will probably have domesticated us, instead of them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They might be the only animal that actively chose to become domesticated.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

"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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Makes you wonder what house cats will be like given the time frame dogs have had.

Probably more of an asshole attitude

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There aren't that many asshole cats, but all cats are assholes sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

All cats have assholes, not all assholes have cats.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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….

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

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 :(