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[–]SpaceHammerhead 84 points85 points  (17 children)

Counselor Troi on Star Trek is one of the most under-appreciated characters in the franchise. And she is under-appreciated because of a failure to understand the profoundly relative nature of human traits. Suppose an alien race appears on the view screen, darting eyes, sweating profusely, stammering over his words, and this alien is saying the Enterprise needs to lower its shields and let him transport over for diplomatic talks. Clearly this alien is lying, and the Enterprise should not do this. Except those are all qualities of human liars, and as far as we know this alien's species simply behaves like that normally. This is where Troi becomes immensely valuable, as she is able to directly read emotions and determine what is or is not normal for this particular species and what actually does map to regular human understanding. She can bypass her human pattern-matching brain and get to the truth of the matter.

In real life, humans have no Troi equivalent. And so we must judge other species, alien as they may be, by our human-oriented pattern matching software. This is where cats enter into things: By a fluke of evolution, cats share many traits human pattern matching software regards as the quality of nobility or elites. What is in reality the product of limited capacity for adaption is interpreted as an aristocratic refusal to bow to other's whims. A natural fear and avoidance of larger (human-sized or above) animals is regarded as fierce individualism. The cleanliness that evolved to mask the cat's odor for hunting is regarded as a mark of sophistication and dignity. Even the tendency of cats to sit on high places, which was undoubtedly quite useful for surveying hunting territory in the wild, is pattern-matched by humans as some kind of natural tendency for cats to sit - as would a duke or some such - literally "above" others. The cat is as Gwern describes:

think of a cat as a small solitary desert ambush predator which happens to have some limited cognitive plasticity in kittenhood

But it just so happens the adaptions it has made to thrive in its home enviroment are erroneously pattern-matched in very positive ways by people, and so we welcomed the little guys into our homes.

Dogs suffer similarly, but in the opposite direction. The dog's obedience is considered a mark of servile stupidity, rather than a product of a talented pack hunter. His relative dirtiness - simply a product of his ancestor's hunting style being active chase rather than ambush - is considered common and unrefined. His gregarious attitude comes from his ancestors actually having strong group dynamics, yet is regarded as proof of his emotionalism and lack of restraint. Meanwhile the cat, which cannot understand anything about the situation it is in, has its perpetual ignorance of what exactly is going on interpreted as some kind of elegant detachment.

Though all this said, I could do with a cat right about now. I have something of a fierce mouse problem at my house.

[–]losvedir 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Nah, people like cats because they're furry and silly and cute, and not a ton of work to take care of.

[–]vintage2018 16 points17 points  (3 children)

Something tells me you’re a dog person, not sure what.

[–]SpaceHammerhead 16 points17 points  (2 children)

I'm not actually, I'm somewhat afraid of dogs - especially big ones. But cats are hardly my great friends, they remind me of Chance the Gardener from the movie Being There if you've ever seen it. So profoundly dumb people mistake it for grace and elegance.

[–]NwallinsFree Speech Warrior 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Is it cats or people that are profoundly dumb here? It parses sensibly either way 😆

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Humans of courrrrse. Cats rule. :)

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (6 children)

Dogs' obedience isn't interpreted as servile stupidity, unless you're assuming from the beginning that loyalty is bad. If they have group dynamics the dog is just actually obeying you because you're in charge.

[–][deleted] -4 points-3 points  (4 children)

I do interpret it as such for the world is full of people betraying those loyal to them.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

He called and commanded me — Therefore, I knew him

But later on, failed me; and — Therefore, I slew him!

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    Gordon R Dickson, Call Him Lord. An unworthy heir is killed for failing one of the tests set by the dynasty of the first emperor's bodyguards.

    [–]AArgot -2 points-1 points  (4 children)

    In real life, humans have no Troi equivalent

    I would say those proficient in mindfulness medication can come close. This awareness allows you to refuse to bow to the drives of evolution, putting you in an observational role of the mechanisms that would drive any evolved entity. That's not to say it allows you to experience all experience that the Universe can manifest, but it allows you to understand that, if an entity is not mindful, then it is at the mercy of mechanisms without awareness of them. It also doesn't mean you are free of mechanism itself. Mechanism is required for mindfulness itself, but awareness reveals this, and allows the potential for science to validate what must be there whatever the degree introspection can reveal the machinery or its consequences.

    Dogs are emotional symbiotes.

    [–]Pax_Empyrean 21 points22 points  (3 children)

    Posts like this are why I'm wary of magic mushrooms.

    [–]AArgot 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    I speak abstractly to be "neutral". Really this just reduces to not letting the brain get caught up in its own thoughts. A "break" is put on so the brain just "idles". It's in this idling mode that processes can be observed (e.g. how thoughts just pop into your head out of the void as opposed to believing that you "will" your own thoughts.) Gentle observations can be made in this state, as long as you don't get caught up in the observation itself.

    There are a functionally infinite number of ways to describe this. I don't know the best way. To me, the Universe is just mathematical in essence, so I use machine metaphors because this gets to the point without coloration.

    In short - it's just meta-cognition. It's a skill set we badly need developed in more minds so don't let me put you off. It's empowering. And "obvious" rather than weird once it clicks. Takes practice though.

    [–]Ilforte 9 points10 points  (0 children)

    Incidentally, magic mushrooms have granted me the ability to get along well and communicate with most, even quite mean, dogs, because I've noticed how exactly they react to my emotions and how they express theirs. Probably that's what most people who aren't anxious around dogs have by default, but it was still a nice boon to me.

    His post seems a bit... weird, I agree.

    [–]Futureboy314 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    Posts like this are why you should probably do magic mushrooms.

    [–]werttrew[S] 34 points35 points  (4 children)

    Most surprising to me was the argument at the end that the successful campaign of neutering pet cats meant that feral cats increasingly dominate the gene pool.

    Reading Cat Sense, I was repeatedly struck: if cats were the size of large dogs and acted like normal cats do now, they would be considered more dangerous than Rottweilers or Dobermanns and feared & outlawed (indeed, many hybrids are outlawed in many places); if a dog breed were as unhealthy, neurotic, unable to adapt, and stressed out by interaction to the point of routine life-threatening kidney failure as normal cats are now, buying such a dog would be considered more immoral than buying an English bulldog now; and so on. But because they are cats, it’s taken for granted and just the status quo. (Oh cats - isn’t so it funny how cats spend all that time staring out the window? Or won’t be in the same room with the family dog? Or hides whenever someone visits? Or pees in your bed? Adorable! No. No, not really.)

    [–]ralf_ 19 points20 points  (3 children)

    I did roll my eyes when my sister paid for a Maine Coon instead of getting a free cat from wherever, but this convinced me that it is not bad that people are breeding gentle and healthy cats.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_Coon

    [–]SchizoidSocialClubIQ, IQ never changes 11 points12 points  (0 children)

    It is likely that Maine Coons have been carefully selected for docility due to their large size as that moves them the kitty-is-cute-when-she-is-angry category to the someone-call-911 category.

    [–]susasusa 6 points7 points  (1 child)

    I know a shelter cat that's probably a Maine Coon mix somewhere a generation or two back... insanely adaptable (has moved very frequently to vastly different households and climates without major issues - LA, deep snow, small boat that moves port to port) and people friendly. That said, the other Maine Coon-ish shelter cat I knew was a psycho.

    ​

    [–]_chris_sutton 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Yea my old cat likely had Maine coon in her as well. She moved around often with no problems, and she was like 9ft long it seemed. Also fat but that was on us - hopefully my ex is doing better at that than we were at the time.

    [–]Ilforte 21 points22 points  (9 children)

    This made me rethink the consequences of feeding stray cats.

    There are multiple cat colonies in my area, mainly populating the basements of apartment buildings. They are sustained by babushkas who cannot afford to hoard animals (or perhaps are still too sane for it) but essentially take care of the cats outdoors – food, water, even some nuances like reducing the opening to the basement so that dogs can't get there. Cats cannot survive on their own because, well, this is Moscow, Russia, there isn't much prey, no nifty accessible trash cans to sift through, and winter is pretty cold (also, whenever truly feral cats emerge, they are decimated by feral – and sometimes domestic – dogs in the same area). There's also no neutering, so I'm not sure how the population keeps stable. Necessarily the cats have undergone some selection even during my lifetime: they've gotten smaller, extremely tolerant of each other and even of domestic animals in some cases, and they trust humans easily. Inasmuch as they influence domestic gene pool, it's an acceptable influence, I suppose.

    On another note, my cat has never hidden from strangers and is very interested in new acquaintances, regardless of species; perhaps more friendly to them than to me. Sadly it's neutered, so here the logic of dysgenics holds.

    [–]gwern 9 points10 points  (8 children)

    I don't know how that would work out. It's true that feeding feral cats in a single centralized spot with shelter is constructing a 'cat colony' which appears to have laid the groundwork for cat domestication, so they are probably more domesticated in a stable way than a true feral cat is; but they are still a lot less domesticated than is ideal for pet cats, and feeding many colonies means there are going to be a lot of these fertile half-feral cats around and able to contribute to pet cat dysgenics. To the extent they crowd out the rare truly feral tomcat from reproducing, they're a bit less dysgenic but to the extent that they are increasing the local feral cat population by orders of magnitude, they would probably be on net making it worse.

    [–]susasusa 12 points13 points  (2 children)

    Istanbul is basically blanketed in outdoor, not-really-owned cats, most of which are remarkably people-oriented and experts at begging at cafes. Saw a tourist sit down in a plaza and a feral immediately hopped on his lap, curled up, and went to sleep.

    [–]MinusInfinitySpoons📎 ⋯ 🖇 ⋯ 🖇🖇 ⋯ 🖇🖇🖇🖇 ⋯ 8 points9 points  (0 children)

    Funny you should mention Istanbul, as video of this cat went viral recently for invading a fashion show there.

    [–]gwern 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Which more or less makes the point, right? They need to be friendly and beg from humans to survive (like, say, dogs). They don't congregate at a cat colony and get fed no matter how hostile they are.

    [–]Ilforte 5 points6 points  (3 children)

    That's a convincing model, but I haven't seen a "truly feral tomcat" in the last five years or so. There appear to be free-roaming males but even they are reasonably approachable. Can a small number of extremely self-sufficient, solitary tomcats skew the selection? I suppose cat reproduction dynamics allow for that; maybe there's some more solid data.

    I think you underestimate the ecological challenge. I read that cats kill some ridiculous number of birds in North America, whereas we don't even have small birds in the inner city any more (there's a lot of pigeons, some crows, a few starlings ­– nothing as easy as sparrows). No trash, no prey, no (survivable) wilderness. They have humans' goodwill as their main food source, and that has to affect the entire population. So they're not "half-feral", more like 15% feral or so.

    On your main point, I believe that "ideal cat" is too high a bar. Those colony cats appear to be more domesticated than average domestic cats from what you've quoted; and are at least on par with what I've seen of the cats who live with my less fortunate friends. At least they're markedly superior on "stress from socialization" metric. We could do vastly better with selective breeding, of course, but that's not going to happen, so semi-ferals with "domestication quotient" matching domestic baseline are the next best thing.

    Regarding cats vs. dogs, it's interesting how much more malleable dogs are – it seems that they have more variations in phenotype than any other species; but other canines turn out to be similarly responsive! I wonder what's so special about canines.

    [–]gwern 8 points9 points  (2 children)

    Can a small number of extremely self-sufficient, solitary tomcats skew the selection? I suppose cat reproduction dynamics allow for that; maybe there's some more solid data.

    Bradshaw does address this point: in one area where there appear to be few feral tomcats, each litter of kittens of the unneutered domestic cats had a different (feral?) father (more unpublished research, apparently):

    For some time, scientists have known that the coat colors of the kittens in some litters can be accounted for only if some had one father and some another. If a female attracts several males, she will sometimes refuse all but one; often, however, she will choose to mate with two or even more...The tomcats must therefore roam as widely as possible, endlessly straining their senses for the yowl and odor of the rare female that is coming into season. Such toms are shadowy animals; some are theoretically "owned" - though their owners rarely see them - and many feral. Because they make themselves inconspicuous except when they have located a prize female, there are probably far more of them than most people realize. When it first became possible to obtain a cat's DNA fingerprint from just a few hairs, my research team attempted to locate every litter born in homes in a couple of districts of Southampton, UK. From what we'd read, we expected to find that just a few "dominant" tomcats had sired most of the litters in each district; instead, we found that out of more than seventy kittens, virtually all litters had different fathers, only one of which we were able to locate. We found no evidence for littermates having different fathers, which implied that most estrous females had attracted only one male. Apparently, by inadvertently "hiding" the few reproductive queens that remain in a sea of spayed females, the widespread adoption of neutering is making it difficult for even the fiercest, strongest tomcat to do much more than search at random, thereby giving all the males in the area an even chance of reproducing.

    For that to be possible (almost 100% unique fathers and a father capture rate of 1/70), there must be a fair number of tomcats doing a very good job of hiding (honestly, it's probably not that hard - just be active at night and use your infinitely superior night vision and excellent hearing to avoid humans, they aren't operating infrared camera-traps after all).

    Those colony cats appear to be more domesticated than average domestic cats from what you've quoted; and are at least on par with what I've seen of the cats who live with my less fortunate friends. At least they're markedly superior on "stress from socialization" metric.

    I don't know they are superior in any way. The environment is quite different. They have the advantage of living in wilder circumstances and particular in a colony of genetically-related individuals they grew up with from kittenhood. Pet cats are usually just fine with cats they knew as kittens - the problem is that in the human setting, where we are constantly moving or getting new cats, this is rarely the case.

    [–]MinusInfinitySpoons📎 ⋯ 🖇 ⋯ 🖇🖇 ⋯ 🖇🖇🖇🖇 ⋯ 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    Have the catch-neuter-release people tried setting up honey traps to catch the feral toms? I.e. attract them with females in heat, or their urine or whatever they use to spread pheromones, audio recordings, or whatever? Maybe you could catch enough that the only toms left to breed would be those who only bred with equally human-avoidant queens, at which point the population would bifurcate into wild and commercially bred domestic subspecies with little admixture, at least in geographic regions with zealous cat-population-control programs.

    EDIT: A further idea: if we're going to neuter and release stray tomcats, because they're unsuitable for adoption, there isn't enough demand or shelter space, or whatever, could we just sterilize them instead of neutering them? (Are kitty vasectomies a thing?) That way, they'd still compete with the remaining intact toms for mating opportunities, which would further suppress the stray population. If you also did this with the female strays (kitty tubal ligation?), that might help by causing the toms to waste time competing over infertile mates. This might conflict with the honey trap idea, though, since that was predicated on the assumption that mating opportunities would be rare and draw out all the tomcats in an area, and that that would be an efficient way to catch fertile tomcats, since the neutered ones presumably wouldn't be as interested.

    [–]ralf_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Was that from 1999 too like Bradshaws testing of the temperament of kittens in Southhampton? That was 20 years ago, surely an effect should be even more stark today? Neutering being a big selection pressure is an eerie idea I never thought about, but I do wonder if (when?) it is really measurable.

    Is Cat Bio Diversity a controversial topic? Are cats in western suburbia different from cats in rural areas, Istanbul or India?

    https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-Indians-have-cats-as-their-pet

    [–]SchizoidSocialClubIQ, IQ never changes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Without neutering the most docile toms, cat populations in non-western countries are not on a un-domestication trend. The existence of feral dogs will preclude the establishment of feral cat colonies that exist in places like Italy.

    [–]lunaranusmade a meme pyramid and climbed to the top 13 points14 points  (5 children)

    How viable would a friendly-cat-breed-breeding business be? Foxes took >20 generations, which would mean >20 years for cats. A long time with no revenues. OTOH if you start with the friendliest breeds you're much closer to the target. You could then sell them (fixed, of course, to maintain a monopoly) at exorbitant prices. Maine Coons go for a grand!

    [–]gwern 17 points18 points  (4 children)

    Yes, that's the natural next question. How long and hard, exactly, would it be to breed cats up a few SD in friendliness, improve kidney function, reduce the prey drive, maybe fix catnip responsiveness as a bonus, and generally finish domesticating cats? Those are a lot of objectives but I think if you applied anywhere near the sophistication and resources applied to, say, dairy cows, it ought to be relatively easy and quick. (The problem is not that it's extremely hard or there is no low-hanging fruit, the problem is no one has tried at all. We are not talking a multi-generational multi-century project like saving the American chestnut tree here.)

    I see foxes as the worst case scenario. Foxes are totally unsuited for domestication: they're already adapted to avoid humans as predators, they have near-zero social skills as they are solitary with no 'fox colony' equivalent, they aren't closely related to any domesticated animals already (what's the closest, wolves?), and so on. But it still took only ~50 years to go from zero to selling them as pets.

    As cats are already decent pets, it ought to be much faster with them.

    As I see it, you would definitely start with Coons/Ragamuffins/Ragdolls and other already well-adapted breeds, and you would try to buy from the top 10% or so for a founding population. After some regression to the mean, this immediately gets you probably several SD above average. That already should be worthwhile to cat owners but given the inertia, they need to be dramatically better in multiple ways to move the zeitgeist. Then you can start doing truncation selection each generation based on their pedigree+behavioral scoring, keeping the top 10-30% of cats (to optimize long-term response), and occasionally updating as long-term data comes in like developing later-life diseases & final lifespan; to offset some costs, you can sell neutered cats after they have been tested and either been bred enough for the next generation or rejected for further breeding. Each generation will get an increase of something like 0.1-0.2SD across the board. By the time such a program has started, maybe marker-assisted selection or PGSes will be available to help finetune selection further. (Given the lowhanging fruit, Bradshaw's suggestion of hybrids probably aren't necessary.) All in all, considering examples I've worked out before of truncation selection, a decade should be possible in theory.

    [–]SchizoidSocialClubIQ, IQ never changes 4 points5 points  (2 children)

    Do Ragdolls have a specific mutation for docility? From the way the establishment of the breed is described on Wikipedia it seems that the founding breeder thought that litters from a cat named Josephine were special.

    [–]gwern 6 points7 points  (1 child)

    I wondered the same thing. A step-change from mother to multiple litters of kittens sounds like a dominant mutation coming from a father, doesn't it? But on the other hand, I've noticed people back then jumped to assumptions of Mendelian variants when they really should not have (from low intelligence to schizophrenia to even catnip response - look at Todd's small partial pedigree table and tell me how convincing catnip looks to be a dominant autosomal...) perhaps because better biometric models were too hard to understand, there's some marketing incentives to exaggerate any difference or imply there's a special mutation just in this one breed (doesn't Baker sound like the sort of person who would shade the truth a bit to make her cats the most awesomest cats of all?), there's no mention of any similar abrupt change in going to Ragamuffins, Ragdolls/Ragamuffins presumably still vary on how friendly & adaptable they are suggesting they aren't genetically identical on the relevant gene(s), and both groups say they explicitly aim for friendliness in general so assuming there even was a single mutation which started it they should've considerably increased the overall polygenic friendliness anyway over the past half century which should be useful to tap into. Until I see a specific gene hit which has been replicated (or at least a good sized pedigree which can clearly distinguish between a polygenic & Mendelian trait underneath measurement error), I am skeptical that a single Mendelian variant is responsible.

    [–]SchizoidSocialClubIQ, IQ never changes 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    I'm watching Youtube videos trying to determine if ragdolls going floppy/limp is unusual. This is where they got their name from, but from what I've seen it doesn't look something very special. If it were it could be a clue that a single Mendelian variant is responsible.

    I have no doubt that docility is a polygenic trait, but there could be a single gene with a disproportionate effect.

    [–]MonkeyTigerCommanderSafe, Sane, and Consensual! 12 points13 points  (0 children)

    if cats could write themselves a wish list for self-improvement, a set of goals to allow them to adapt to the demands we place on them, it might look something like this:

    • To get along better with other cats, so that social encounters are no longer a source of anxiety.
    • To understand human behavior better, so that encounters with unfamiliar people no longer feel like a threat.
    • To overcome the compulsion to hunt even on a full stomach.

    Turns out I'm a cat, lads.

    [–]flagamuffin 10 points11 points  (0 children)

    has gwern written about human domestication?

    [–]hold_my_fish 8 points9 points  (0 children)

    I'm glad he mentioned Ragdoll near the end, since that seems like a case where cat domestication was done more-or-less properly.

    [–]Ratav 7 points8 points  (1 child)

    Fascinating long read. And kind of existentially terrifying - another tragedy just under our eyes that I never saw.

    (Aside : I see some [Math Processing Error] in the text, not sure if bug from me or the page)

    [–]gwern 5 points6 points  (0 children)

    (Aside : I see some [Math Processing Error] in the text, not sure if bug from me or the page)

    The math is valid and renders fine for me in FF. I've seen that error in the past, and usually it means that the MathJax JS didn't load properly or didn't run for some reason, and a force-refresh fixes it.

    [–]zergling_LesterSW 6193 8 points9 points  (2 children)

    people think that meows and other sounds are communication but as cat owners are unable to interpret other cats’ sounds, the meows generally seem to represent an arbitrary language learned by each cat by trial-and-error

    My mom's cat learned to vocalize from her own chirping response to butterflies, she doesn't know how to meow in the more ordinary sense.

    [..] abdicating cat reproduction to the worst possible cats, the cats so fearful and averse to humans that they are feral strays who can’t be caught [..] So in other words, if cats were steadily de-domesticating and becoming sicker, between all the environmental interventions and additional spending and tolerance for crazy cats, the world would look… much as it does now.

    This is a part that don't get, why both dedomistication and getting sicker? Shouldn't strong natural selection for survivability on semi-feral cats be good for the gene pool?

    Cats don’t exhibit a clear domestication syndrome of small skulls, floppy ears, no longer going into heat, piebald coats, etc. (The domesticated foxes do.)

    This is actually the most fascinating part IMO. It's unclear: do or do not cat breeders select for friendliness in particular? If not, then does nobody couldn't be bothered to run a 10 year long experiment and see what happens?

    But if they in effect do, or if that experiment proves a failure, that would be much more interesting, because it would mean that foxes (and other canids probably) for some reason have an easily tunable genetic mechanism that brings out neotenic traits and incidentally enables super fast domestication.

    [–]gwern 20 points21 points  (0 children)

    Shouldn't strong natural selection for survivability on semi-feral cats be good for the gene pool?

    There's a few points one could make here:

    1. 'survivability'/'fitness' in the wild is not the same thing as fitness in captivity or as a pet. That's much of the problem here: the levels of paranoia that are 100% justified in the wild are profoundly harmful as a pet. Imagine a vet coming back from daily patrols in Afghanistan to a quiet Midwestern town. It's not just being fearful of humans, it's the whole package.
    2. feral cats live short, nasty, brutish lives. 5 years might be the average life expectancy, between accidents like being run over by cars, predators such as dogs, cat influenza, freezing to death, bad luck while hunting, etc. This selects for stuff like hunting ability and general robustness but only in the short-term. If they get cancer at 9 years, it has near-zero fitness effect. (Indeed, they might be even more prone to disease later on due to corner-cutting while young, antagonistic pleiotropy - r/k selection. There's no point in having excellent DNA damage repair or anti-senescence or anti-cancer mechanisms when you will probably be dead by 6 or 7 and have had all the kittens you will ever have.)
    3. selection has a 'budget'. You can only select on so much at once, because random environmental noise gets in the way, and you have to preserve a large number of individuals from a finite population to avoid extinction. Perhaps there would be selection for better general health, but the feral cat selection budget is being entirely spent on more pressing matters, like avoiding do-gooder humans.

    do or do not cat breeders select for friendliness in particular?

    Most of them select for appearance. Like the Siamese cats. They're pretty crazy and have odd mental disorders like the wool-eating and literally can't see straight because their eyes are physically messed up, all of which you would think breeders would get rid of, but preserving the prized Siamese appearance has always been more important, and hobbyist breeders aren't well placed to run this sort of program. You need either an institution or business. Someone breeding 1 cat a year for a dozen years as a hobby during retirement isn't going to do the trick.

    If not, then does nobody couldn't be bothered to run a 10 year long experiment and see what happens?

    Why does hardly any cat research get done, much less elaborate genetics experiments? Experiments are expensive. Who's going to pay for it?

    [–]TheLastArcadian 7 points8 points  (0 children)

    This is a part that don't get, why both dedomistication and getting sicker? Shouldn't strong natural selection for survivability on semi-feral cats be good for the gene pool?

    Cat diseases strike at too high an age for natural selection to be effective. Being wary of strange people and situations improves reproductive success from age zero. Even a friendly and familiar human might go on the Internet and get (then follow) advice to trap and neuter the cat.

    This is actually the most fascinating part IMO. It's unclear: do or do not cat breeders select for friendliness in particular? If not, then does nobody couldn't be bothered to run a 10 year long experiment and see what happens?

    I think Ragdolls were intentionally bred to be friendlier, with a lot of success. Ragdolls can even enjoy being picked up, which most cats don't.

    [–]_jkf_ 5 points6 points  (0 children)

    "Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat."