Things that Yorami know: Who is the cat attached to?

Limor asks: Is the cat attached to its owner or to the place?

Humanity is divided, as we know, into dog lovers and cat fans and thus these two animals were destined to represent opposites: the loyal, dependent dog bound to its owner versus the selfish, independent cat bound only to the territory where it agrees to our presence. The stereotype of a dog and a cat is not new and even sages, as recounted in the tractate of parenting, were required to explain the difference between the creatures "His students asked Rabbi Elazar: Why does a dog know its owner (its owner) and a cat does not know its owner? He said to them: And what is the food from what a mouse eats forgets, the food is a mouse itself all the more"

That is, according to Rabbi Elazar and his students, the cat simply does not remember who is in his house and the reason for the forgetfulness is eating mice. Whoever eats food that has been gnawed by a mouse, according to the Gemara, his memory will be damaged, and from this it is clear that whoever eats mice will be harmed doubly. It seems that Rabbi Elazar did not raise a cat himself: the cat is not forgetful and he knows very well who shares the house with him. And yet the cat is an enigma. Domesticated animals come from among the animals that are used to living in a herd so that man takes the place of the leader in the social hierarchy. Cats in the wild are solitary creatures, so the cat does not seem like a natural candidate for domestication.

As a domesticated creature, the cat shows much fewer characteristics that will endear it to its owner than the dog. While the contact with the human turned the cow into a walking udder and the dog adapted human characteristics including reading facial expressions, the cat was much less affected by entering our home. In a comparative experiment in which food was placed in a bowl out of the animal's reach, the dogs were able to easily "explain" to their owners their desire by looking at their faces and alternately at the food. The cats, no less intelligent animals, simply did not catch the trick, thousands of years of living together did not teach the cat to direct a gaze to capture our attention. It is possible that the cat's lack of interest in our body language is what makes it so difficult to train the cat. 1

What makes the cat more distant than the dog? A cat's skeleton was found in a Cypriot grave from 7500 BC, since there were no wild cats on the island, it is clear that this is a cat that was brought there by humans, therefore archaeologists dated the cat's domestication to this period. A cat skeleton was found in an Egyptian tomb dated to 3,700 BC. However, the cat becomes an artistic motif and cat skeletons become common in Egyptians only in the third millennium BC. Earlier skeletons such as this one from Cyprus may belong to a wild animal that was kept as an ornament in a cage and a careful examination revealed that the Egyptian skeleton belongs to a swamp cat and not to the wild cat that is the ancestor of the domesticated cat.

Fractures that have had time to unite indicate aggressive capture, that is, an injury that is not typical of a domesticated animal, and the union of the fragments due to the captivity of the animal for at least several weeks. The dog, on the other hand, was domesticated no later than 15,000 years ago and probably long before that. But even 5,000 years is a long time and not only seniority is responsible for the difference. From the moment the first wolf pups were taken to the human den, the domestic dog was separated from its siblings in the wild. Domesticated dogs are the descendants of other domesticated dogs, those that satisfied the will of their owners to the extent that they satisfied their lack and raised them.

The evolutionary pressure on the domestic dog was one: to like humans. Thus, over many generations, dogs whose behavior and appearance remind us of our own kind have been consistently preferred. This process was made possible because the tendency to obey the leader in the pack is genetically ingrained in the wolf ancestors of the dog and man only exaggerated it to the point of turning the dog into an eternal puppy. The history of the cat is completely different And similarly to the honey bee There is reason to ask whether this is a domesticated animal at all. We did not bring cats to us, but the wild cats came to the abundance of rodents around the human settlements. Unlike dogs, there was no violent and hermetic separation between the wild population and domestic cats.

A possible reason for this is that the cat, unlike the dog and humans, is an absolute carnivore and not an omnivore, a menu of leftovers that is absolutely sufficient for a dog will not satisfy a cat that has gone out to look for extras of game meat. There, outside, he would find his half-wild relatives. Between the cat on the sofa in the living room and the wild wild cat there is a sequence of semi-domesticated cats, yard cats that get all or part of their food from humans, street cats, cats on the outskirts of the settlement that alternately subsist on hunting and scraps and truly wild cats. These populations are related to each other, mixing and interbreeding. The development of "canine" traits, primarily a dependent attachment to the owner, is also avoided thanks to the contact with those semi-wild cats that, for their survival, need very different qualities than kindness and obedience.

But from a genetic point of view, the domestication of the cat began about 150 years ago in the Western world and in most countries of the world the process has not actually started yet. The flow of genes from the wild population to the domesticated animals prevented the appearance of anthropomorphic (human-like) changes that so characterize most breeds of toy dogs. The difference is noticeable when you compare the great shape change that different dog breeds have gone through to evoke feelings of affection. There is no feline counterpart to its round head and human mouth-like jaws that made the bulldog disabled from birth. The changes that can still be discerned between a domestic cat and a feral or semi-feral cat are tiny in comparison. One of them is a high-frequency "meow" sound that is more pleasant to the human ear, a behavior that the cat should learn at the age of 2-9 weeks, as well as lifting the tail upwards when approaching the owner. This tail movement is not observed in wild cats but in infancy and is directed from the cub to its mother.

The density of the cat population around the human settlements has created pressure to expand the communication gestures and in the cat packs, it is observed that adult cats raise their tails towards each other and towards humans if the cat meets them in the same learning window up to about two months of age. The cat is a unique case of a borderline animal, the cat that snuggles and purrs from melitofino went outside the house and will socialize with cats that do not differ in their menu and lifestyle from their wild ancestors. Perhaps it is precisely this duality that provokes such strong reactions: from the worship of the cat in Egypt to its burning at the stake in medieval Europe. And yet: where do we fit into the world of this semi-domesticated animal? 

Cats do not form packs like monkeys or wolves, so they have no tendency to see any creature as a leader who must be obeyed, but cat packs made up of relatives maintain a loose social structure even in nature. Cats that know each other from a young age tend to be in the neighborhood and groom each other. Since the cat knows very well how to keep clean even alone, the role of mutual scratching is not hygienic but social. A cat will accept whoever is near it as a relative and will ask for its closeness, this rule applies to other cats, humans and even dogs to which the cat is introduced in the first six months of its life. Well Lemur, the cat is attached both to a place that provides it with protection and food and to its owner, but it is a different type of bond. For the cat the owner is not a father figure or a leader but a friend of equal status. What to do, an equal relationship, at eye level, is what is difficult for many of us to understand or accept and therefore the cat is destined to be a revered or hated but always mysterious animal.

Itay asks: How come thousands of years of evolution didn't help a cat - to look left and right before crossing the road.
First of all, cars cruise the roads for only about 100 years, that is 20-30 feline generations, much less than what is required for evolution to operate. Still, why does an animal as agile and alert as a cat line the roadsides with its corpses?

No one counts the run over cats in our country, but in the statistics-loving USA there was someone who estimated the number of run over cats at 5.4 million per year compared to a little over a million dogs, a strange result considering that there are more dogs than cats. Most dogs are run over when they break into the road in their pursuit of a ball, a cat, or another dog and such incidents may occur at any time of the day. Cats are sensible creatures and even when chasing or fleeing they calculate their way, very few cats will just break into a busy road in the middle of the day. The vast majority of cats are run over at night, the reason is not carelessness but a miscalculation: the cat follows the light of the car's headlights and when the beam of light passes, it enters and is run over by the car driving a few meters behind it.  

Noa asks: Is it true that cats never die at home, but leave it to do so? If so, why? And how do they know when they will die?

At least when it comes to trampling cats you are right: a simple observation reveals that they always prefer to do this outside the house. The cat is indeed an intelligent animal, but still only an animal. Death is an abstract concept that there is no reason to assume that it is known to quadrupeds. Humans also manage to understand the concepts of finality and the irreversibility of death only at the age of 7 or so. A sick cat will prefer to be isolated, and if the isolation corner is in the yard and the disease is serious enough, it will die in the hideout. Cats, according to the testimony of veterinarians, disguise their illnesses well and sometimes the owner does not know the seriousness of the cat's health condition until it "disappears to die". Cats do not consider us particularly in their lives and there is no reason for them to start sparing our feelings when they are dying.

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More of the topic in Hayadan:

• The domestic cat genome is decoded; Reveals clues about the domestication process
• A dog attacking a cat is not news, cats attacking a dog is real news
• Domestication of the cat - when and how did it happen?

• The cat - 3 kilos or 250, it's basically the same animal