Cats, at least modern house cats, love their humans. Nothing else explains why cats demand petting, sleep on favored human's beds, sit in laps, and purr when picked up and stroked. They get terribly lonely when left alone. But what is the evolutionary origin of this gene? Cats are solitary hunters, not pack animals. Before hooking up with humans back in Egyptian times, what good would a gene to love humans do for a cat? I have read of small African wild cats that cannot be tamed even today. Presumably that breed of cat lacks the love gene.
After hooking up with humans, the love gene is obviously a good thing. Compare well fed and sleek house cats with skinny, dirty, and miserable looking alley cats. It interacts successfully with the love animals gene in humans.
Perhaps the cat love gene is a mutation or only occurs in small numbers of cats in the wild. The love animals gene in humans prompts them to adopt kittens. Perhaps the adoptions proceeded unsuccessfully until some human got lucky and adopted a kitten carrying the love gene. Once settled in with humans the cats with the love gene would flourish and the cats that lacked it would go back to the wild.
Does this account for a origin of the species of affectionate cats?
4 comments:
One has to wonder. We have seven cats and the love they give (as well as the warmth during the winter) never ceases to amaze us. They comfort us as we comfort them.
Of course they really love us right around suppertime....
Well yes, my cat does love her cat food. But she lets me know it's time to be fed by rolling the dish around the kitchen rather than buttering me up the cats do.
One of our cats, Minnie, will sit down on the coffee table in front of me and stare at me starting about 20 minutes before suppertime. She'll stare at me with her big, soulful eyes, acting as if she's just this side of starving to death. If I try to ignore her by reading the newspaper, she'll reach up and pull the top of the paper down so I can see how pitiful she looks. it's not easy to ignore her attempts to get me to feed her and the others before their regular time.
Over here Stupid Beast hasn't learned how to guilt trip me, yet. She loves company and follows me around the house, down to the shop, out on the porch (summer time only).
Post a Comment