Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

Cats are not hyper-social, and because they are not domesticated in the sense that dogs are, they cannot be trained using methods based on social approval. Wolves began the domestication process 100,000 years ago, while cats likely began to approach human settlements around 10,000 years ago, after the dawn of agriculture. There is some evidence of cats in hunter-gatherer societies, but scientists are still debating the likelihood that cats’ presence among humans was common before humans began to establish settlements and farms. Cats are said to have a mutualistic rather than a symbiotic relationship with humans; this means that they benefit from proximity to humans but do not rely on them. Dogs, on the other hand, were vital to early humans’ attempts to guard their settlements and to hunt, and humans provided dogs with the food they needed to survive.

Cats have had a markedly different experience with humans than dogs. During dogs’ domestication process, dogs that were tamer, calmer, and better at guarding settlements were preferred by humans, and the process of natural selection ensured that each successive generation of dogs further exhibited these traits. Cats, on the other hand, were incapable of guarding settlements, and all cats had relatively similar hunting abilities.