Current mood:

immature

Practical Biology Lesson of the Day
This post is about kitty cats. I like kitty cats.

Cats aren't social animals. Not the way dogs are; modern dogs in their many varied forms are quite different animals from their wild ancestors, make no mistake, but once upon a time they depended on their groups for survival, and the remnants of that need fed into their relationship with us humans as we tamed them. Presumably this is the case with horses and rabbits and rats, though none of those have been domesticated as long nor altered as much (well -- the horses are pretty darn close, but they've been working animals as much as companions too). Wild cats are solitary hunters, territorial, meeting only to mate or when there's a dispute over land. That's rare among species we ended up domesticating.

Feral domestic cats, on the other hand, are surprisingly friendly. They tend to form into groups even though they still don't hunt together and don't form strict social hierarchies or anything like that. There's no real advantage wait no, there's food availability things sometimes. It's still far from the behavior of solitary wildcats, since ferals do this completely voluntarily. Maybe they just like the company. It's one thing I like about cats, as compared to those other pets: the idea that they don't need me, they just like me.

Domestication is... well, it's very weird. Some folks in Russia spent fifty years experimenting with the domestication of foxes, aggressively breeding based on temperament. They got some very tame foxes that acted a lot like dogs, and in fact sounded and looked more like dogs (apparently the capacity for white paws is very important to domesticity, guys). So there's some deep stuff going on in the genes there. It's common, in particular, for domesticated animals to start keeping a lot of infantile features. That is to say, while there's a lot of physical variation among dogs and all, they generally look more like a baby wolf than an adult one -- some of 'em look more like a fetus, heck. The technical term for this is pedomorphosis, for the record.

Given that there's clearly a link between physical characteristics and behavior, that pretty much makes sense. A baby animal is easier to get along with than an adult, right? They're more docile, more curious, and much, much less focused on the drives to survive and reproduce. Above all, they're dependent. And, perhaps, even territorial animals expect to have company when they're part of a litter. I mean, I don't know that that's really the connection, but it would make sense to me at least. Anyway, the upshot is that domestication, looked at from a certain angle, is really sort of creepy. You could say we're basically inducing developmental disorders for our own profit.

On the other hand, it depends who you ask, but some consider humans to be pedomorphic as well. There's the fact that we take a stupidly long time to mature physically, of course. We certainly look more like the baby forms of most primates than the adults, anyway, but of course we're not actually chimpanzees. It seems like we also look more like baby Neanderthals than adults, but you can never exactly be sure about that, and it's up for grabs how closely we're related to them anyway. I'm not going to make any assertions about all that, but if you do buy it, you may wish to know one of our more notably infantile features is the skull: humans, like baby apes, have big heads with high foreheads. We also appear to retain the ability to learn a lot longer. So based on that, according to some theories, stunted development may have been really damn good for our brains.

Granted, that doesn't mean the same is true of cats and dogs, not in the least. It's kind of cute that we brought them down with us, I guess. I dunno. My good friend Ashford seems quite happy when he can spend all night cuddling with me, and that's a particular kind of pleasure his wild ancestors never could have dreamed of. That doesn't mean it's better, either, but I'm glad he's enjoying it at least.

Incidentally, plants can also be considered domesticated, and I don't even know what that means in a context without behavior. I'm no botanist. In any case, when we humans modify plants we tend to do something more of the opposite, exaggerating sexual characteristics because those are usually the parts we eat. Enjoy your dinner!