How Did Cats Become Pets?

Cats are beloved companions that have played an important cultural role for millennia. They come in different sizes, shapes, colors, and purrrrr–sonalities. Your cat might think she’s a fearsome predator, but there are some differences between pets like Fern, Roy, and Spicy and a truly wild cat. Monisa: They’re both obligatory carnivores. They both can sleep up to 20 hours a day. They’re both very much in tune with their hunting instincts. But they are different in kind of a few key ways. Wildcats can't purr. Domestic cats are much more docile. They’re friendly. They have the capacity to form relationships with humans and each other in a way that wouldn’t necessarily happen in the wild. They can also learn through, like, reward-based stimuli, so like giving them certain rewards for doing certain things in the home, that can work. Although as a cat owner, it hasn’t worked for me yet, but I’m told it works. Our cat companions evolved about 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. Monisa: The reason why they became domesticated, archaeologists and historians believe, is because at the time, that’s when people started to settle into villages and not pursue more of a nomadic lifestyle. And in these villages, they would farm. And when you farm and live in a village, you start to store your crops and your harvest. Well, storing the crops and the harvest in turn brought in a lot of pests and vermin like mice who would come to nibble on the stored harvest. That also attracted the local Afro-Asiatic wildcat, which is the closest relative to domestic cats and is what they evolved from.

Monisa: They became bold enough to venture into human spaces because there was a lot of prey that was easy to access and there wasn’t a lot of competition. Humans aren’t fighting cats to get some mice, right? And so eventually the cats and the humans formed this relationship of give and take that also turned into something friendly, and then over time the cats evolved to be domestic. The ways humans have interacted with cats has changed over time. We’ve feared them, revered them, relied on them, and recorded them for memes. Still, while many pet cats are thriving, most wild cats are critically endangered today.

Conservation efforts are vital to ensuring that these animals survive to the next generation. Because even though they’re fierce hunters with majestic manes and thundering roars, these big cats are still just cats, after all.