Flickr/Loïc Lagarde Cats live in our homes and eat the food we provide for them. But they can also be aloof, disinterested in our affection, and difficult if not impossible to train.
So are cats actually domesticated? And how did they get here, anyway?
These are questions that scientists are still asking today, and for good reason.
Most of the animals we've domesticated serve a food or utility purpose, such as providing milk or meat or transportation. But Felis catus, as researchers refer to your pet, occupies a unique niche amongst the other animals we've brought into our sphere — namely, that they don't do much.
Contrast that to dogs, our first domesticated companions: They're our hunting partners, livestock herders, and security guards, all in a friendly, furry package that constantly (sometimes annoyingly) seeks our affection and approval.
For the most part cats play none of these roles. They do provide pest control and companionship, but as cat owners will admit, they do it on their own terms. It's rare to have a cat that follow commands.
So why did we let them into our homes in the first place?
Once we started growing and storing our own crops some 10,000 years ago, wildcats began hanging around and making easy meals of the mice and other vermin our food stores attracted. Archaeological sites strongly support this: For example, researchers have found cat skeletons full of rodents who had eaten domesticated grains at early agricultural societies.
Reuters Photographer/ReutersVicious opportunistsDogs also just kind of showed up, albeit much earlier — about 30,000 years ago, possibly even 100,000 years ago. That and humans also quickly got to breeding and training the wolves who hung around and ate our garbage.
Yet after almost 10 millennia of living with humans, cats are for the most part still aloof and untrainable.
In fact, house cats differ very little from their closest relative and wild form, the wildcat (Felis silvestris). These wildcats a little larger than domesticated cats, and our pets have longer intestinal tracts — a trait Charles Darwin suggested helped them digest their "less strictly carnivorous" diet.
But otherwise, they're almost identical animals, minus the house cat's unique tolerance for living around people.
Even then, house cats can easily transition back into the wild. The most pampered felines may have trouble hunting for their own meals, but house cats are still highly evolved hypercarnivores (with diets of more than 70% meat) and their hunting instincts haven't faded much since taking up with humans.
Whether they're fully domesticated or merely opportunists who shack up with us to kill vermin, cats certainly stand as an interesting exception from the rest of humanity's animal food sources, companions, and workers.
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