Rats, mice, and ferrets are all pets but we’re leaving the cutest rodent on the table! Why?
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Companion animals and “pets” like pet snakes, spiders, or squirrels are two different things.
People can tame nearly any animal and make it a “pet”, with various degrees of success – some are more just for display (like a pet fish), others more interactive. But only a very few animals can truly become companion animals.
What distinguishes the two, is that companion animals have some degree of inherent social nature that humans can co-opt for their own benefit.
Dogs are the obvious example – the ancestors of dogs, and dogs that have gone feral, form packs. Dogs as companion animals accept human families as their “pack”.
Cats are more subtle. The ancestors of cats, and cats that have gone feral, may if the conditions are right form colonies. They don’t cooperate in hunting like dogs do, but the females will cooperate in rearing kittens, with older “matriarchs” helping out younger moms (often their own descendants). This greatly increases survivability of kittens.
Cats as companion animals accept human households as their colonies, and their owners as matriarchs – a tendency reinforced by humans feeding, grooming and protecting their pets. Cats, as it were, remain permanent “kittens” in relation to their owners.
(Cats also have a bunch of really useful instinctive traits that make them good companions for people – within cat colonies, cats are careful not to leave their shit and pee exposed, because that is an aggressive assertion of territory – they naturally bury it.)
Lots of animals though lack the instincts for such sociability for humans to co-opt. This means they are difficult to retain as companion animals. Humans can raise them from infants, but when they become adults they don’t stay permanently in an infant-like relationship with people like cats, or accept humans as their pack like dogs – they want to move on. This makes them less than ideal as companion pets.
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