OneAndOneIs2

I grew up with dogs. I understand dogs. Dogs are descended from wolves. Wolves live in packs. Dogs think in terms of pack.

So a dog owned by a family of humans is, in its mind, part of the humans' pack. Doesn't matter that the rest of its pack walk on two legs and don't bark: Pack isn't about family or even species. It's just a collection of individuals that work together.

So a dog has its pack. Simple.

And then there's the domesticated cat. Although a few types of wild cat do live in groups - a pride of lions being the most well-known one - housecats are descended from a race of solitary hunters. And based on the number of near-fights that we've seen, they're certainly territorial.

Not a gregarious, pack-living species, then.

So how, exactly, do humans fit into their world view??

Seriously: Dogs have a race memory of being a wolf living in a pack; humans therefore fit into the space in their minds reserved for "Members of my pack".

Cats have a race memory of being solitary, territorial hunters. Where, exactly, do they fit "Massive pink things that seem friendly enough most of the time but yell when I drag things I hunted into the house"?? What experience does a wildcat have of "Enormous furless creatures that don't seem to really do much but are good for sitting on when it's cold"??

Based purely on their history, cats should have no real interest in humans. And admittedly, some of them are fairly aloof.

But others..

Take my kitten. On Thursday evening I was late getting home. So on Friday morning, I was woken up by a small fuzzy alarm clock. She followed me downstairs when I had breakfast, then followed me back up when I went to have a shower. She sat on my bed and waited for me to come back, and made pitiful noises if I didn't pay her enough attention.

She followed me around all morning because I was a couple of hours late getting home the night before.

That is *not* the behaviour of a self-sufficient hunting animal. That's the behaviour that got the hopeless creature nicknamed "Squeak".

(The other one got the nickname "Hopeless". The other day I had to pick her up and hold her five feet off the ground so she could hunt, kill, and eat the fly that had been buzzing around the top of the door. No, that's not a joke. Or an exaggeration.)

I know cats have been domesticated for a long time. But in no way did they have the close relationship with humans that dogs did: Dogs were a vital part of the hunting or farming team. Cats were the things you chucked in the barn to keep down the mice. Dogs got fed with the food they helped supply. Cats didn't get fed at all: They had to catch their food.

So how did they become so people-oriented? Lions have their pride, wolves have their pack.. cats have neither. What exactly do they think we ARE??

P.S. As a further example of their weird behaviour, I was just reading an excerpt from Wikipedia (out loud) that explains that cats walk very precisely due to directly registering, when my kitten, who was standing on the windowsill, tried to turn around and promptly fell off onto the desk, narrowly avoiding landing on my carnivorous plants.