Who Domesticated Whom? The Cat That Chose Us (#781)
From commensalism to companionship.
How an independent little predator became one of humanity's closest friends.
There is something rather extraordinary about the domestic cat.
We provide it with food, shelter, medical care, comfortable furniture, and occasionally an outrageously expensive bed that it promptly ignores in favor of the cardboard box in which it arrived.
And what does the cat provide in return?
Sometimes affection.
Occasionally gratitude.
Frequently indifference.
Yet millions of people adore these small carnivores.
In my previous post, I introduced the word ailurophile, meaning someone who loves cats.
But that raises a rather intriguing question.
If humans love cats, why did cats choose to live with humans in the first place?
The answer takes us back thousands of years, to the beginnings of agriculture, and introduces three fascinating biological concepts:
Commensalism, mutualism, and self-domestication.
An Invitation Nobody Issued
Approximately 10,000 years ago, as humans began establishing permanent agricultural settlements in the Near East, they inadvertently created a new ecological opportunity.
They grew crops.
They harvested grain.
They stored food.
And the rodents arrived.
For small wildcats, these settlements offered something irresistible: a reliable supply of prey.
The African and Near Eastern wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica (often classified today as Felis lybica), is the principal ancestor of our domestic cat.
Some of these wildcats were presumably less fearful of humans than others.
Those willing to approach settlements could exploit the abundant rodent populations
Humans, meanwhile, had little reason to discourage an animal that helped protect their food supplies.
Nobody needed to capture a wildcat and announce: You are now domesticated.
The relationship may have begun simply because two species discovered that living near one another was advantageous.
Commensalism: The Beginning of a Relationship
Biologists have a word for an association in which one species benefits while the other is neither significantly helped nor harmed.
Commensalism.
The term comes from Latin roots meaning, roughly, sharing a table.
It is a particularly appropriate image for the early relationship between cats and humans.
The wildcats were not literally invited to dinner.
They were simply taking advantage of the opportunities created by human activity.
This is sometimes called the commensal pathway to domestication.
Unlike many domesticated animals, which humans deliberately bred for food, labor, or other purposes, cats appear to have followed humans into their settlements largely through their own behavior.
There is an important qualification, however.
We cannot reconstruct every stage of feline domestication with certainty, and human selection eventually played a role.
Nevertheless, the central idea remains fascinating.
Cats may have begun domesticating themselves long before humans made any deliberate attempt to domesticate them.
From Commensalism to Mutualism
Over time, the relationship developed into something more reciprocal.
Biologists call a relationship in which both species benefit mutualism.
Cats gained access to food resources, shelter, and eventually human protection.
Humans gained the services of an efficient rodent predator.
It was an arrangement that required no written agreement, no negotiations, and certainly no committee meetings.
Both parties benefited.
But mutualism alone does not explain why a modern cat chooses to curl up beside its owner, follow a familiar person around the house, or greet someone returning home.
Those behaviors suggest that something more developed during the long association between our species.
The relationship became social.
Did Cats Really Domesticate Themselves?
The concept of self-domestication deserves some explanation.
Domestication is an evolutionary process involving genetic changes across generations, often influenced by human selection.
In the case of cats, natural selection may initially have favored individuals that tolerated human proximity.
A wildcat that fled at the first sight of a person might have abandoned a productive hunting area.
A less fearful animal could remain.
Over generations, differences in temperament and tolerance could have helped establish populations increasingly comfortable around humans.
Eventually, humans also influenced which cats survived and reproduced.
The result was the domestic cat: Felis catus.
Interestingly, domestic cats remain remarkably similar to their wild ancestors in many aspects of anatomy and behavior.
They retain their predatory instincts, sensory abilities, territorial behavior, and much of the behavioral repertoire of solitary hunters.
A cat sleeping peacefully on a sofa is still, biologically speaking, a highly specialized predator.
The sofa is simply a more comfortable place to sleep between hunting opportunities.
But Do Cats Actually Love Us?
This is where the story becomes especially interesting.
For years, cats have been portrayed as aloof, independent, and emotionally detached.
Dogs, by comparison, are commonly described as affectionate, loyal, and eager to please.
But these stereotypes oversimplify the behavior of both species.
Scientific studies have demonstrated that cats can recognize familiar human voices, distinguish familiar people, and develop attachment relationships with their caregivers.
Research by Kristyn Vitale and colleagues, published in Current Biology in 2019, found that many cats displayed patterns of attachment to human caregivers resembling those described in studies of children and dogs.
This does not prove that cats experience love in precisely the same way humans do.
Indeed, we should be cautious about attributing human emotional experiences to animals without appropriate evidence.
But it does suggest that the cat-human relationship extends well beyond access to food.
Cats can form enduring social bonds with people.
Their independence does not exclude attachment.
And perhaps this is something humans occasionally struggle to understand: affection does not always require constant demonstrations of devotion.
Who Chose Whom?
There is a fundamental difference between the evolutionary histories of dogs and cats.
Dogs descended from wolves and underwent a long, complex domestication process involving increasingly close cooperation with humans.
They were eventually selected for an extraordinary range of functions, including hunting, guarding, herding, and companionship.
Cats followed a different path.
Their early association with humans was probably driven largely by ecological opportunity rather than deliberate human selection.
Humans did not initially need cats to obey commands, retrieve objects, herd livestock, or defend settlements.
They simply needed them to catch mice.
And cats were already exceptionally good at that.
Consequently, there was less evolutionary pressure to transform the cat into an animal that constantly sought human direction.
The domestic cat could remain relatively independent while still benefiting from human association.
In evolutionary terms, that was an extremely successful strategy.
The Paradox of Independence
Perhaps the most appealing feature of cats is the very characteristic that sometimes frustrates their owners.
Their independence.
We often interpret affection through human expectations.
We want animals to respond when called, seek our company, and demonstrate recognizable signs of attachment.
Dogs frequently oblige.
Cats may have other priorities.
Yet independence and affection are not mutually exclusive.
A cat that chooses to approach a person, settle beside them, and remain there may be expressing a genuine social preference.
Of course, it might also be seeking warmth.
The two explanations are not mutually exclusive either.
Animal behavior is rarely as simple as we would like it to be.
A Relationship With Responsibilities
There is another important dimension to this evolutionary story.
The same characteristics that made cats successful companions also make them remarkably effective predators.
Domestic cats have retained much of the hunting behavior of their wild ancestors.
Consequently, free-ranging cats can have serious consequences for wildlife, particularly on islands and in ecosystems containing vulnerable native species.
This creates an interesting ethical challenge.
We may celebrate the independence of cats, but that independence does not absolve us of responsibility for their welfare or their effects on other animals.
Responsible ownership means providing appropriate environmental enrichment, opportunities to express normal feline behavior, veterinary care, and safe living conditions.
It also means protecting wildlife from unnecessary predation.
We should not confuse respect for an animal's natural behavior with an obligation to permit every expression of that behavior in every environment.
After all, domestication created responsibilities for humans as well as benefits for cats.
From Opportunity To Affection
The journey from wildcat to domestic companion is one of the most remarkable examples of an evolving relationship between humans and another species.
It probably began with rodents.
It developed through tolerance.
It became mutually beneficial.
And eventually, in many cases, it developed into a relationship characterized by familiarity, trust, and social attachment.
There is no need to imagine that ancient wildcats approached human settlements seeking affection.
They were probably looking for dinner.
But evolution has a wonderful way of producing consequences that neither participant could possibly have anticipated.
Thousands of years later, humans invite cats into their homes, spend considerable sums on their welfare, mourn their deaths, and describe them as members of the family.
And cats?
They continue to behave in ways that remind us that companionship does not necessarily require obedience.
A Final Thought
In the previous essay, we learned that an ailurophile is someone who loves cats.
But perhaps the more interesting question is whether cats have become anthropophiles - animals that are fond of humans.
Anthropophile is not an established term specifically for a cat that loves people, but it is an appealing linguistic possibility.
The biological history suggests that cats initially approached humans because of opportunity rather than affection.
Yet the relationship evolved into something far richer.
We fed them, protected them, and welcomed them into our homes.
They controlled rodents, entertained us, occasionally tolerated our affection, and gradually became members of our families.
So, who domesticated whom?
The scientific answer is that domestication was a complex evolutionary process involving both feline adaptation and human influence.
But there is another answer, one that every ailurophile will appreciate.
We may have domesticated the cat, but the cat has become remarkably successful at domesticating us.
And somewhere, at this very moment, a cat is sitting on its owner's favorite chair, looking entirely satisfied with the arrangement.
Sources
Driscoll, C. A., et al. (2007). The Near Eastern origin of cat domestication. Science, 317, 519–523. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5612713/
Vigne, J.-D., et al. (2004). Early taming of the cat in Cyprus. Science, 304, 259. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5612713/pdf/nihms905511.pdf
Ottoni, C., et al. (2017). The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1, 0139. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/080028v1.full
Vitale, K. R., Behnke, A. C., & Udell, M. A. R. (2019). Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans. Current Biology, 29, R864–R865. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31086-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982219310863%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Loss, S. R., Will, T., & Marra, P. P. (2013). The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States. Nature Communications, 4, 1396. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
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