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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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
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.
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