>Is there something in modern cats’ diet / habits that makes them more susceptible to disease?
The cheap supermarket dog/cat food can hardly be called a food. It is an epitome of bottom line optimization. Grain and the "by-products" - frequently the 1st/2nd ingredients - which is hides/hooves/beaks/horns/etc. flooded with industrial chemicals back at the China's giga-meat-factories and powdered.
There's a good reason they're as widespread as humans. They're machines.
I was thinking a bit longer term. This effectively free new source of food is going to lead to fatter cats who have more kittens, who in turn survive better because there's more food.
>Don’t feed them commercial pet food (especially dry).
Absolutely correct. Don't feed any pet commercial pet food! Feed raw. I recommend Darwin's Raw Food, but there are many others out there.
I accidentally gave diabetes to my beloved cat Penguino. He was eating standard dry (and occasionally wet) cat food for the first 6-ish years of his life. Suddenly he dropped from 13 lbs to 9 lbs in about a year. Fast forward four years and thousands of insulin and vet dollars, he is much healthier and on a raw diet, but will need insulin 2x a day for the rest of his life. Mishandling his food and health is one of my deepest regrets. And it was almost entirely avoidable, had I had the right information.
> Tangent: why hasn't there been a breeding program to make domestic cats... more domesticated (i.e. friendlier)?
I've wondered this myself after reading Bradshaw's book on the domestication & psychology of cats, _Cat Sense_, where he points out that not only are cats not nearly as well domesticated as dogs and this seems to be the root of a lot of cat problems (such as the urinary idiopathic cystitis which nearly killed my cat last year, or the cat bites which are extremely dangerous and send countless people to the ER with blood infections, including my grandmother), they also are probably de-domesticating as cat reproduction is increasingly carried out only by feral strays. Cat personality and personableness definitely are genetically influenced, and this has been demonstrated by the usual methods like crossfostering (the offspring of feral fathers are less friendly even when raised by friendly mothers with zero contact with the father).
I'm not sure why, but it seems to be that most people don't regard it as a problem that can be affected, it's "just how cats are", and the scattershot cat breeders are almost all entirely obsessed with coat color/appearance and to a very limited extent, the worst inherited diseases. In addition, there is an incredible lack of cat research compared to dog research, despite being such a popular pet, which has even drawn comment from outsiders: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/science/dog-science-cats....
(My favorite example of this: for 60 years, if you asked any reference source like Wikipedia about why some cats respond to catnip and others don't, you'd be told this is because catnip sensitivity is controlled by a single autosomal dominant gene, based on 1 small Boston cat colony pedigree done back in the '60s. Turns out this is entirely wrong, it's highly polygenic, but it took until 2011 for a grad student to demonstrate this, and it took another 6 years until I stumbled across her thesis and added it to Wikipedia.)
> Cats murder birds and other creatures for no purpose other than personal satisfaction.
They do this in large part because we've intentionally bred them this way. Domesticated cats exist primarily for pest control so they are incentivized to always kill substantially more than they consume. When kept as working animals, their primary purpose is to hunt as many rodents and other pests (which when the job involves protecting grain, this often includes birds) as possible.
> except in net when in confined spaces with their owners
> Sorry, I've always been a dog person.
The same in large part applies to dogs as well. The difference is that while a cat may be kept outside entirely and kept free running, dogs tend to be more tethered to their owners.
This is especially true when you don't live on a giant property spanning acres. In these cases your dog generally is confined to your property and often comes inside for the night. And when leaving the property they are kept on a leash. Cats can be the same way as long as you either (a) select for temperament or (b) raise them from kittens.
Our cats stay inside but we go out with them on a leash from time to time for them to walk around and enjoy the wide open world. It's a decent bit of work to train them to do this but in all fairness the same applies to dogs with the exception that we already expect this of them so we go through the process of leash training them more or less by default.
TLDR: Cats and dogs more or less have the same sets of appeal. Cats have their own dedicated roles as work animals but as general pets their appeal is largely the same. IMHO the main difference is that cats tend to have clearer boundaries than dogs and at least when neutered they tend to keep up hygiene a bit better and smell less in general. Also cat biscuits and purring are weirdly cathartic.
> I wouldn't say my cats are smart but you can definitely see they are natural born killers. Everything they set their eyes on dies. Flies, spiders, you name it. Nothing is too quick for them.
Most cats I've known don't kill much. They might pounce on a lizard or fly to catch it and play with it, but I can't remember the last time I've seen them actually kill something. Certainly never gotten the fabled "gift" of a dead animal from a disappointed cat who thinks I can't get my own food. I wonder what the difference is.
> That, I think, explains a lot of their behavior.
I honestly think the hardest part of explaining cat behavior is how chaotic they are as a species. You can explain A cat's behavior, but it's harder to explain all of them. My cats, for example, completely understand knocking over (even large) containers to get food, understand that turning door knobs will open doors (thankfully their lack of thumbs means they usually don't have the grip to pull it off), but fail to understand that sitting ON the closed food container means I can't use it to feed them.
Ive read that not only are cats more recently domesticated than dogs (like, by an order of magnitude of years, with dogs domesticated 50k-80k years ago) but that domestication didn't involve OUR deliberate breeding of them outside of recent centuries, so the traits selected for are more about compatibility (for their benefit) than for anything we explicitly want. My personal theory is that housecats are often from such small genepools (that haven't had a lot of recessives weeded out of them yet) that cats tend to be this mix of genius and idiot and weird, so it's very hard to extrapolate generalities from a few specimens. But that theory is likely worthless.
oh my cat don't even eat the animals it brings back inside the house. Birds, baby rabbits (these ones survives for it can catch them but not kill them), lizards by the metric ton, spiders, mice...
It brings them back to me and let them in the living room.
Sometimes I get two animals a day.
I don't know: maybe the cat understood we do the cooking and somehow thinks we're going to cook all it brings back.
I remember an old blog where some coder who also had a relentless cat (I'd say at least 10 years ago) set up face a webcam and face recognition for its cat inside the pet door and wouldn't let the door open if the cat had something in its mouse.
I don't know. I've been considering pets for several months since I'm now spending so much time at home and, as for many people looking for some at home companionship, it comes down to dog or cat.
I've read a reasonable amount of material that suggests that if your cat is kept indoors it's a lot more likely to be unhappy. So if you must own a cat then keeping it indoors may not be the best strategy for the cat. On the other hand, the point about environmental impact of cats - killing of birds and other small animals - might be a really good argument against having cat full stop. If you can't keep it in a way that ensures its welfare whilst also ensuring that it doesn't cause havoc amongst the local wildlife, maybe don't get one at all.
>But when you live in a condo with no backyard, or some other city dwelling like that, a cat makes far more sense, and doesn't require the ridiculous amount of maintenance that a dog does.
That's exactly what I'm saying. The dog is conspicuous consumption. It's signaling that you are willing to burn resources (time in particular) in a similar manner you would on a child. The lizard brain eats that shit up and the human brain is none the wiser. As a byproduct of being far more practical in terms of time/money resources the cat does not broadcast that signal. Nobody is saying the cat is not more practical. That's a given.
The cheap supermarket dog/cat food can hardly be called a food. It is an epitome of bottom line optimization. Grain and the "by-products" - frequently the 1st/2nd ingredients - which is hides/hooves/beaks/horns/etc. flooded with industrial chemicals back at the China's giga-meat-factories and powdered.
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