The Only One That Said Yes
The domestic cat is the only domesticated species in the whole family Felidae. Every other cat, from the lion down, declined.
Advances in archaeology and genetics have shown that domestication started in the Near East around 7500 BCE, and the modern house cat probably descends from the African wildcat.
What makes the story different from the dog's is that several natural traits of wildcats may have pre-adapted them for living with people, rather than people having selected for those traits. They were already small. They were already social. They had obvious body language, a love of play and high intelligence. And their rigorous grooming habits and instinct to bury their waste made them far less messy to live alongside than most domestic animals.
They are also still capable of surviving perfectly well in the wild, which is not something you can say about most domesticated animals.
Built for Small Prey in Low Light
A cat is an obligate carnivore, which means a predominantly meat-based diet is not a preference but a requirement.
Everything about the body follows from the job. Retractable claws are adapted to killing small prey such as mice and rats. The body is strong and flexible, the reflexes quick, the teeth sharp. Night vision and sense of smell are both well developed.
It is also a crepuscular predator, most active around dawn and dusk, and a solitary hunter even though the species itself is social. Cats hunt alone but live together, which is an unusual combination.
The hearing is the most underrated part. A cat can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, including the sounds made by small mammals. The prey a cat is built to catch is audible to the cat in a range we cannot enter at all.
What the Purring Is Actually For
Cat communication is broader than most owners realise: meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling, grunting, body language and scent marking, plus the secretion and detection of pheromones.
Purring is usually read as simple pleasure, and that is not quite right. It is thought to begin as a mechanism of reassurance between mother cats and nursing kittens, who use it as a care-soliciting signal. Cats past nursing age do also purr as a sign of contentment, when being petted, relaxing or eating.
But it has been recorded in a wide variety of circumstances, most of which involve physical contact rather than happiness specifically. It is closer to a social signal than an emotional readout.
Cat intelligence shows up in adaptability, learning through observation and solving problems. The vocabulary for cats is oddly rich too: a male is a tom, a female a queen, a young cat a kitten, and a group can be a clowder, a glaring or a colony.
Six Hundred Million of Them
There are an estimated 600 million domestic cats worldwide, and the distribution is lopsided. Around 400 million of them live in Asia, including 58 million in China. The United States has about 73.8 million and the United Kingdom about 10.9 million.
They are valued for companionship and for killing vermin, and are kept as pets, as working cats, and as pedigreed animals shown at cat fancy events.
There is a serious cost attached. Cats also range freely as feral animals, avoiding human contact, and pet abandonment keeps increasing that global feral population. Those populations have driven declines in bird, mammal and reptile species, which is why population control through spaying and neutering matters.
A genetic footnote: analysis of the domestic cat genome shows the ancestral wildcat genome was significantly altered during domestication, as specific mutations were selected to create breeds. Most breeds are founded on random-bred cats, and genetic diversity is lowest in purebred populations.
