← Back to context

Comment by lukan

12 days ago

"By contrast cats are not really domesticated and cannot be, no matter how you treat them"

Of course you can. A small tiger won't sleep on your couch and remembers not to make a mess in the house. And when a small tiger attacks you, it can still be dangerous. There are still wild cats around here (in europe) - and they would not get that tame so easily.

(Also you can teach cats some commands, it is just way more work and the commands won't work all the time)

11 comments

lukan

Reply
boffinAudio  12 days ago

I have a random stray living in my yard, in a major metropolitan city here in central Europe, who regularly displays immense affection for me (of course, I feed her) and is playful and engaged and interacts with me in what would be perceived, by humans, in a loving manner.

However, she has her limits, and will often give me a hefty bite if I do something she considers unacceptable, such as stop scratching her ears and instead try to pet her fur or clear it of nestles, which she seems to love collecting.

It is me, being domesticated. I wait for my ears to flop.

  • fl7305  12 days ago

    Isn't it the scientific consensus that humans also show signs of domestication?

    • Tor3  12 days ago

      The article in the post includes a link to exactly that. The hypothesis is that groups of humans one way or another weeded out the too aggressive ones, and thereby made it possible to actually create groups (where "aggressive" here means to automatically "bare their teeth and hiss" to newcomers, like undomesticated animals often do).

    • boffinAudio  12 days ago

      It may well be, but the authority in my garden has demonstrated to me time and again that my claims of science are entirely irrelevant if the dindins aren't deposited in a timely manner, in which case, its war and thus bitey bitey time .. she does get pretty familiar with the scientific method, howevever, when the time comes to chase away the bugs and deposit certain necessary fluids in the neighbors rose bed, whatever their religion has to say on the subject ...

Sayrus  12 days ago

Pet tigers are actually a thing. Like cats they sometimes attack their owner. Unlike cats, the amount of force they can use can easily kill a human, even when playing.

  • lukan  12 days ago

    I would argue, with tigers they wanted to kill, when they did.

    Humans don't die so easily.

    Cats can in general play without (seriously) hurting one another or a human.

    On the other hand, even a small cat could kill a human by going to the throat, which they could. But they don't. The house cat evolved to manipulate us instead to get what they want, instead of eating and killing us. Those cats that tried that, like tigers, got allmost extinct. And from what I know, there are bigger limits to what a tiger will do, instead of a house cat. And yes, they are bigger and any bad mood of them allways very dangerous.

    • somenameforme  12 days ago

      I wouldn't anthropomorphize wild animals kept as pets. Such animals aren't thinking about killing, per se, nor are they attacking things because they're in a bad mood. They're driven by instincts and those instincts, which are generally involve killing anything they can, sometimes just inappropriately click on.

      For instance we were introducing one of our cats to a new stray kitten we found. We've done this plenty of times before and are used to the process including having them play footsie under the door for weeks, reading positive body language (tail posture, etc) and so on. It was all positive. So we let them see each other. Everything was going really well until the kitten decided to boldly just march up to the cat.

      Something just clicked in her at that point. The cat, the most docile and friendly cat imaginable, just pounced and decided she was going to wreck the kitten. After separating her we assumed it was her way of trying to roughly assert dominance, reminding the kitten she was being a bit too familiar. That was until we were treating the kitten and saw the bite marks were in the throat area - she would have 100% killed the kitten if we had acted half a second more slowly.

      After that she was all back to being nice and friendly outside the door, but we decided to find the kitten a new home instead of risking being a bit too slow the second time.

      1 reply →