3 ms·
I think cats are going to change more over the present+coming few centuries than in those 10k years. Dogs have been bred for millennia for a variety of tasks an
by gwern 9y ago
I think cats are going to change more over the present+coming few centuries than in those 10k years. Dogs have been bred for millennia for a variety of tasks and because they live directly with humans; cats, on the other hand, have generally only been valued for pest control and have been left alone. But now that they are indoor pets (with cat litter! would the popularity of cats be what it is now if cat litter hadn't been invented just 70 years ago? think about the smell), the interest is huge and the number of breeds has been exploding.
And you can think of many ways to improve cats: adaption to dry carb-rich kibble which is the cheapest and most convenient food, to reduce obesity; reducing scratching and urination impulses, the former of which is responsible for the perceived need for 'declawing'; better social skills for understanding humans, trainability, and getting along with other cats and pets; resistance to common domestic cat diseases like FIV, feline lukemia etc.; maintenance of juvenile curiosity/adaptability over loner parts of the lifespan (old cats getting fixed in their ways is a serious behavioral problem)... A breeder's job is never done.
- gwern 9y agoOr here's an obvious improvement: catnip response. It's good for the owner and good for the cat - fun, energizing, cheap, and safe. But around a third of cats are catnip-resistant ( https://www.gwern.net/Catnip https://www.gwern.net/Catnip ). It's autosomal dominant at high frequency, so it would be easy to increase all the way to fixation with a little selective breeding (and that also implies, along with the widespreadness of catnip response in the Felidae family, that catnip response isn't harmful). Just, no one has.