Cats, the tiny felines of our house bound worlds. The “only on my terms” miniture murder mittens that we love and adore. They hunt pests for us, they show us love, fear and cleverness. They are some of the laziest animals (sleeping up to 70% of their life while cleaning themselves 15% of the day) and yet they are adorable, okay maybe only to some of us.
Cats don’t use their meows to talk to other cats. They actually use their voices to communicate with us. They can also jump up to 8 feet high. No wonder they have 9 lives. They also only sweat through their paws, ew gross. Cats have 3 eyelids, their noises are as unique as a human's fingerprint, and they have 5x better hearing than humans do. Cats share 95% of their DNA with tigers. Which to some of us, is actually pretty scary. Alright we know you get it, cats are pretty cool animals.
So how long have cats been domesticated? In usual feline form, cats waited before jumping into our domesticated home lives. According to recent studies, cats lived alongside us humans before being domesticated. Ancestors of today's cats spread from southeast Asia to Europe around 4400 B.C. They believed cats started spending time around farming communities in the fertile crescent 8000 years ago. They believe at that point cats became a type of pest control for the humans which became a great partnership.
Mice and rat populations were attracted to the crops which in turn attracted the cats as rodents being their natural prey. Scientists and historians believe this is the first encounters humans and cats had with each other. And they believe humans allowed cats to domesticate themselves.
Cats are pretty unique. They tolerate us as humans and even other types of domesticated pets we bring in our homes like dogs. And cats differ from dogs on how they were domesticated. Specifically because dogs were domesticated to perform specific tasks because of traits they possess unlike cats. And although some may not agree, with over 74 million cats domesticated living in U.S. homes cats are pretty popular house pet. Now if they only looked at us like our dogs do.
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