And what were they when they were still in the wild?
In: Biology
Dogs and cats self-domesticated, which is different from how other animals because domesticated.
Most animals became domesticated when ancient humans deliberately made an effort to capture them, tame them and breed them to be more docile.
Cats and dogs are a bit different.
With dogs, the theory is they started hanging around ancient camp sites to eat our scraps. Gradually they became less afraid of humans, and humans started interacting with them more and teaching them to help with hunting and keeping guard at night.
There are actually some colonies of baboons that keep dogs as pets, which might be what early human-dog relations looked like.
Cats, meanwhile, started hanging around when we developed agriculture. Cats eat mice, which helps humans out by protecting our food, and they don’t cause any real damage to anything we care about. So after a while, cats evolved to be less afraid of humans, and just kinda ended up moving into our houses like a “short term” houseguest who just never gives a timeline for moving on.
There’s actually not a huge difference between domestic cats and their wild equivalents. It’s pretty much some minor cosmetic changes in cost colour, and domestic cats being less afraid of people.
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