Kitty Stoke

[KQ]

Tigger is really happy with the flower!

Aw... that's so sweet and he's got his favorite towel in the mix too. Flower's getting fuzzy from all his lovin'. I stuffed that one really full of nip.

[chunder]

Cat Boule > Cat Cave

[Norseman]

[4matic]

Good to see the Burmese beauty with shiny fur

[skaredshtles]

"I'm all in. It's amazing how tiring it is doing nowt, you know."

[Meadow Skipper]

Two approaches to nap time.

[Harry]

^^ you got the kitty teepee !!


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[Meadow Skipper]

^^ you got the kitty teepee !!

Yeah, sometimes KQ gets it right.

[KQ]

Such cute kittehs! Love them!

[grinch]

Ya until theyre not
Want one of these

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[KQ]

Ya until theyre not
Want one of these

Love.

[Buster Highmen]

I know that our cats lick me just to get a taste of what's to come.

[skaredshtles]

I know that our cats lick me just to get a taste of what's to come.

This. I know that he is just waiting for us to die so he can eat our faces off JUST like the baby bunnies he's caught.

[KQ]

Are Cats Domesticated?



The cat does not offer services,” William Burroughs wrote. “The cat offers itself.” But it does so with unapologetic ambivalence. Greet a cat enthusiastically, and it might respond with nothing more than a few unhurried blinks. Later, as you’re trying to work, it will commandeer your lap, keyboard, and attention, purring all the while. A cat will mew at the food bowl in the morning and set off on a multiple-day trek in the afternoon. Dogs are dependent on us to the point of being obsequious, but cats seem to be constantly reëvaluating the merits of our relationship, as well as their role in domestic life. “Are cats domesticated?” is one of the most frequently Googled questions about the animals, based on the search engine’s autocomplete suggestions.

It’s a question that scientists have been asking, too. The latest answer, based on insights from recent archeological discoveries and genome-sequencing studies, is that cats are semi-domesticated. Conventional wisdom holds that the ancient Egyptians were the first people to bond with the cat, only four thousand years ago. In 2004, however, a team of French researchers working in Cyprus unearthed the ninety-five-hundred-year-old remains of a human and a cat buried side by side. Last year, an analysis of cat bones and teeth from a fifty-three-hundred-year-old settlement in China indicated that the animals were eating rodents, grains, and the leftovers of human meals. It appears that, following the advent of agriculture, wildcats in the Near East and Asia likely began to congregate near farms and grain stores, where mice and rats were abundant. People tolerated the volunteer exterminators, and wildcats became increasingly comfortable with people. Whether this affiliation began five or ten millennia ago, the evidence suggests that cats have not been part of our domestic domain for nearly as long as dogs, which have been our companions for perhaps forty thousand years.

At first, the cat was yet another opportunistic creature that evolved to take advantage of civilization. It was essentially a larger version of the rodents it caught. Somewhere along the line, people shifted from tolerating cats to welcoming them, providing extra food and a warm place to sleep. Why? Perhaps because of the cat’s innate predisposition to tameness and its inherent faunal charm—what the Japanese would call kawaii. Look up photos of the thirty-eight or so wildcat species and you might be surprised by how easy it is to picture one curled up on the couch. Dogs likely initiated their own domestication, too, by prowling around campfires in search of food scraps. Whereas our ancestors quickly harnessed dogs to useful tasks, breeding them to guard, hunt, and herd, they never asked much of cats. We have also been slow to diversify cat breeds. Many dog, horse, and cattle breeds are more than five hundred years old, but the first documented cat fanciers’ show didn’t take place until 1871, at the Crystal Palace, in London, and most modern cat breeds emerged only within the past fifty years.

This relatively short and lenient period of selective breeding is manifest in the cat genome, Wesley Warren, a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis, said. In a study published last year, Warren and his colleagues analyzed DNA from several wildcats and breeds of domestic cat, including an Abyssinian named Cinnamon. They confirmed that, genetically, cats have diverged much less from their wildcat ancestors than dogs have from wolves, and that the cat genome has much more modest signatures of artificial selection. Because cats also retain sharper hunting skills than dogs, abandoned felines are more likely to survive without any human help. In some countries, feral cats routinely breed with their wildcat cousins. “There’s still a lot of genetic mixing,” Warren said. “You don’t have the true differentiation you see between wolf and dog. Using the dog as the best comparison, the modern cat is not what I would call fully domesticated.”

Not all researchers agree. “I don’t think it makes sense to talk about animals as semi- or fully domesticated,” Greger Larson, a paleogeneticist and archeologist at Oxford University and an expert on domestication, said. “Any threshold you try to define will necessarily be arbitrary.” Larson tends to agree with the views of Melinda Zeder, an archeologist at the Smithsonian Institution, who has written extensively on the domestication of both plants and animals. Zeder characterized domestication as an ongoing symbiosis between humans and another species—“a sort of pact that ends up being mutually beneficial,” she said. This relationship, she argued, can follow many paths and result in somewhat different outcomes, which she has catalogued. Sometimes people gradually domesticate a prey species—sheep, goats, cattle—or deliberately remove non-prey animals from the wild and breed them for a specific purpose, as we’ve done with horses. In other cases, hunger draws a wild animal—dogs, chickens, guinea pigs, cats—to human society, where it becomes increasingly tolerant of people. Even a single domestic lineage can contain varying degrees of dependency and a range of temperaments.

“Cats are domesticated,” Zeder said. “But I think what confuses people about cats is that they still carry some of the more aloof behaviors of their solitary wild progenitors. Sometimes they don’t give a damn about you, but they are very much part of your niche. Cats have us do everything for them. We clean their litter, stroke them, admire them, but, unlike dogs, they do not have to constantly please and satisfy our needs. They are probably the ultimate domesticate.”

When I was growing up, in California, I had a tuxedo cat named Jasmine. When I called her, she would sometimes stop in place and stare at me for a few minutes before trotting over, as though she needed to preserve the pretense that this meeting was entirely her idea. She was incredibly affectionate when she wanted to be, but she spent most of her time in solitude. Like so many of her ilk, she loved to perch herself on or near a windowsill, surveying the outdoors for hours. It strikes me now how quintessentially feline that behavior is: a docile carnivore balanced on the border of a human home, alone and content, yet with all its senses tuned to the world beyond.

[Buster Highmen]

In 2004, however, a team of French researchers working in Cyprus unearthed the ninety-five-hundred-year-old remains of a human and a cat buried side by side.
.

One may infer a number of reasons for this. The one I cited above may have some purchase.

I had a cat in high school who more or less adopted me.
It was a stray I played with but my parents wouldn't let it in the house, so it dug a access under our porch. It was a tabby with a unique gray and red striped coat.

I surreptitiously slipped it food now and then. I remember raking leaves and mowing the lawn with that cat cavorting around, chasing leaves, attacking the rake with a sideways bouncing charge.

Finally, my parents acquiesced to letting it in.

It slept with me and would follow me to school (it was a 5 block walk) both in the morning and after lunch, so I'd leave it in the house where my mom said it would howl at the door to be let out. It met me on my way home a block from our house. It came when I called.

The next year, I got sent to early University and had to walk 4 blocks in the other direction after lunch to get to the math department.

One day the cat didn't appear. A few days later I saw it's coat smeared into the tarmac of a busy street between our house and the University. That cat was loyal.

[grinch]

That descibes mine to a T. Its now inside all winter and outside 24/7 all summer. Super affectionate then with a snap of the fingers off to her zone in solitude. Gets her favorite food whenever she demands it then i walk outside and she's finishing up the mouse or squirrel brains she's just caught. The boss has a meow thatll make you melt though. A cute killer

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[KQ]

One may infer a number of reasons for this. The one I cited above may have some purchase.

I had a cat in high school who more or less adopted me.
It was a stray I played with but my parents wouldn't let it in the house, so it dug a access under our porch. It was a tabby with a unique gray and red striped coat.

I surreptitiously slipped it food now and then. I remember raking leaves and mowing the lawn with that cat cavorting around, chasing leaves, attacking the rake with a sideways bouncing charge.

Finally, my parents acquiesced to letting it in.

It slept with me and would follow me to school (it was a 5 block walk) both in the morning and after lunch, so I'd leave it in the house where my mom said it would howl at the door to be let out. It met me on my way home a block from our house. It came when I called.

The next year, I got sent to early University and had to walk 4 blocks in the other direction after lunch to get to the math department.

One day the cat didn't appear. A few days later I saw it's coat smeared into the tarmac of a busy street between our house and the University. That cat was loyal.

[Harry]

^^ hahahahaha


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[grinch]

Walter!! That mustve taken a lot of temptations to get that shot

Walters bro?
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSPd1UvM...dium=copy_link

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[isisis]

Izzy's human just finished the last of 6 rounds of chemo & is doing great, all things considered. While I have immensely enjoyed cat-sitting the little terror during her 5-month stay with me, I am overjoyed that her owner is well enough for the 2 of them to be reunited very soon. Fuck cancer!

[grinch]

Thats great. Reuniting will be great for both. Heres to continued healing for your friend

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[Meadow Skipper]

Good on you, isisis p, for helping out there. My heartfelt good wishes for your friend.

[KQ]

Izzy's human just finished the last of 6 rounds of chemo & is doing great, all things considered. While I have immensely enjoyed cat-sitting the little terror during her 5-month stay with me, I am overjoyed that her owner is well enough for the 2 of them to be reunited very soon. Fuck cancer!

That's so wonderful. You did a really good thing easing your friend's mind by taking care of her kitteh.

[grinch]

Walter never not training

https://www.instagram.com/p/CSS7-V7t...dium=copy_link

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[KQ]