While they might kill a few rats, the populations of rats are so big that there’s no way the cats can ever repress them. People have tried it before – letting a feral cat colony go within a certain area, with the goal of keeping rat populations down. Looks can be deceiving! CTVĬat named Baby sees a pack of pit bulls and brings it Why would these animals fight and risk their lives, when they could just comfortably graze together?Īww. Cats and rats have been photographed sharing piles of trash. They can kill rats but they have no reason to, in our cities. I was surprised to learn that cats aren’t even that good at killing rats.Ĭats are magnificent hunters, and they can hunt anything from butterflies to wallabies. One justification people give for keeping cats around is that they hunt rodents. That gave them a leg up on the competition, and made them an intriguing and charming presence, rather than a straight-up nuisance, like a raccoon. This set of features, which is actually just an expression of the way the cat hunts, looks to us like our infants. They have round faces because they have short, powerful jaws. They have little noses, because they don’t hunt by smell. One reason is that cats have a set of physical features that, for completely accidental reasons, remind us of human babies.Ĭats have big round eyes located right in the middle of their faces, because they’re ambush predators and need good binocular vision. But there are reasons that cats made the transition, but we don’t have badgers or foxes as pets today. So how did they trick us into feeding them and taking care of them?Ī kitten in a makeshift sweater awaits adoption at a local pet store rescued kitty in a sock sweater will melt your heartįor a long time, it was probably just an accident. They got into this new niche and exploited it. All of these animals crept into our settlement and were eating our trash – animals like badgers and foxes, in addition to small wildcats. House cats sidled up to our first settlements 10,000 years ago, because of big changes we started making to the environment. But what on earth did we want cats around for?Īs I talked to scientists, it dawned on me that we weren’t necessarily the ones who were driving this relationship. There’s a purpose for the animal, and it’s really clear: We want its meat or its milk or its fur or its labor. Usually, you don’t have to write a 200-page book to figure out why we domesticated an animal. They’re hard to physically control, and they don’t tolerate confinement well. But cats are solitary animals that don’t have social hierarchies. Dogs and cattle have lead animals, and we can control them by acting the alpha dog or the lead steer. We also tended toward animals that had social hierarchies that we could dominate. Cats eat only fancy food, meat that we could eat ourselves. When people set out to domesticate the first animals, we targeted animals that were easy to keep in confined spaces, and animals that would eat a variety of things – think of a pig or a goat, which will eat any old swill left over from your kitchen. Why is that?Ĭats are uniquely ill-suited for domestication. You write that cats are a rather unlikely house pet. Science of Us spoke with Tucker about the disturbing similarities between cats and lions, the reason cats failed to uphold the Rabbit Suppression Act of 1884, and the somewhat baffling question of why people put up with them. In “ The Lion in the Living Room: How Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World,” journalist Abigail Tucker traces cats’ journey from fearsome Near Eastern predator to global intruder, shedding light on how this baby-sized beast worked its way into so many homes. The cat-less can get their fix at “cat cafés” opening across Asia, Europe, and North America. There are an estimated 100 million pet cats in the U.S., and their ranks are only growing. Humans’ relationship with cats is rife with paradox. Nearly half of house cats have physically attacked their owners. (The Australian government has funded research into the most efficient methods of cat control – yielding products like a poison-laced kangaroo sausage called “Eradicat.”) They’re a disaster for the environment: One conservancy organization has called cats the “ecological axis of evil.” American cats kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds each year, and they’ve been implicated in dozens of mammalian extinctions. government euthanizes millions of stray cats each year. When a stray cat wandered onto the tracks of a midtown 7 train in New York City last month, the MTA halted the entire subway line until the animal was out of harm’s way. The cat is one of the most powerful animals on the planet, author saysĮven if your cat doesn't give you toxoplasmosis, it may not be wonderful for your mental health
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