Cats would become official heirlooms, passed down between house and family.
You know how there’s all those fuckin people who swear they were Napoleon or Cleopatra in a previous life? Something like that.
“I’ll have you know that Mr Mittens was a favorite bed cat of Charlemagne!”
Cats would not evolve very quickly. Because of their ancestors filling the ecological niche, taking resources, new generations wouldn’t have room to compete. So we would have less varieties of cats.
They are domesticated? I’ve seen African wild cats go up to people, purr, and then get angry when food is around just like the ferals in the neighborhood.
Cats self domesticated. Which suggests their natural behavior isn’t far removed from what we’d expect from domestic animals.
Dogs were selectively domesticated from some pleistocene species of wolf, from which the modem Gray Wolf also descended. Probably due to initially also exhibiting some of those traits naturally.
If they still bred the same way, the world suffer mass extinction.
Cats would be studied and experimented to create all sort of grift like snail juice creams and the entire culture of Chinese animal “medicine” we have today.
Maybe what we have now is actually better for the cats.
