If its in their DNA to hunt and be ferocious how were people able to make it so those traits became passive or safe for them to be around humans?
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We didn’t really actively do it to them so much as they gradually went from hunting the small animals we attracted, to realizing people can be good for other things too.
Trial and error on the part of the cats. Humans would chase off or kill dangerous cats but generally ignore the passive cats. Cats were useful for hunting pest and humans would share food supplies to keep friendly cats around.
Humans didn’t do much. Cats just kinda showed up and helped out with the rodents, people realized that this is cool because rodents were a big issue. Been friends with cats ever since.
See how the more agrarian cultures – like ancient Egypt – valued cats more. Why? Because rodents.
Like wild dogs. If a parent is killed in a trap, sometimes the pups/kittens ate found alive.
There was a street cat that recently gave birth. My wife began feeding them. Even though we gave them food, they were skittish and avoided us, except one of them was friendly.
We adopted the friendly one. Its normal for a litter of pups/kittens to have physical variations, and to also have personality variations.
If you breed only friendly versions of a wild animal, over time they will become instinctively friendly towards humans
Visit any fishing boat area where the boats land to unload the fish. Cats showed up there to get fish guts and leftovers. It would be a daily thing. Cats learned the people will toss you food for free, just for showing up.
Cats that were overly aggressive towards humans would be killed or driven out. Cats that showed affection towards humans would be offered shelter and a stable food supply. Over time, the friendly ones ended up breeding a lineage of domestic cats that are extremely tolerant of humans.
Cats gradually became adapted to us.
Human settlements and houses were good sources of food for cats because we stored large amounts of food, which attracted rodents.
Cats that were skittish when humans were 100 ft around had lesser hunting prospects than cats that were only skittish at 50 ft. So the latter cat was more likely to reproduce. But soon, those cats started having kittens that were only skittish at 20 feet. So those cats had better hunting prospects, so they reproduced. Eventually, you had cats that would also be comfortable sitting on a person’s lap getting pets, those were taken in because they provided companionship as well as rodent control.
Ta da, you got domestication.
It’s just selective breeding.
Cats show up to eat rodents, and people let them because that’s good for us. We kill or run-off problem cats. Cats that are very intolerant of our presence don’t stick around. The comfortable-wit-people and well-behaved cats breed and create their own population, partially isolated. People find and adopt kittens, and kittens that grow up around people become tame. Those that don’t be tame and act nice get killed or kicked out, and the nice cats are allowed to live with us and breed.
Eventually, we end up with cats almost as physically capable of hunting and killing as wild populations, but with some behavioral and physiological changes that make living with, tolerating, and communicating with humans.
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