Domestic cats can be disturbing to those
who don’t know them. Such people usually call themselves “dog people,”
but in reality they’re just afraid.
I can relate to this. Cat-lovers posting distracting memes on social
media may give the impression that their favorite little pets exist to
entertain humanity by making adorable faces accompanied by adorably
ungrammatical captions, or to amuse us by leaping up in instinctual
terror when confronted by a surreptitiously placed cucumber. In reality domestic cats (felis catus)
are fearsome predators, smaller first cousins to pumas, panthers, and
saber-toothed tigers. According to a National Geographic DNA study, it’s
likely that cats were drawn to farming communities in the Fertile
Crescent 8000 years ago. They struck up a mutually beneficial
relationship with our human ancestors, controlling rodents in exchange
for food, and spread from southwest Asia into Europe as early as 4400
B.C. The process of domestication, according to evolutionary
geneticists, hardly changed felis catus at all. In the words of
the late Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, “The cat is a wild animal
that inhabits the homes of humans.” ... [mehr] http://lithub.com/the-half-wild-muse-on-writers-and-their-cats/
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