They also build social relationships with other cats. Wild cats may form larger groups of up to a few dozen animals, which join forces to drive out invaders from their territory. The only exception are lions. They live like wolves in packs and hunt and eat together, which is extremely unusual for cats. It therefore hunts alone - like most pantherine cats it does not need the help of its conspecifics. The African wildcat only eats small animals: mice, rats, birds and reptiles. Domestication probably began about 9,500 years ago in Cyprus, French researchers reported in the journal Science. It is only slightly aggressive and therefore easy to tame. This subspecies can be found in North Africa, on the Arabian Peninsula and as far as the Caspian Sea. The ancestor of the domestic cat is the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica). They did not live in large packs with a clear social structure like the ancestors of the dogs - the wolves.
There is a simple reason for why cats are so different from dogs - and thus also in their relationships to humans: "Cats are originally loners and independent," explains Dennis Turner. This does not mean, however, that cats generally have no ties to their owners, Potter and Mills say. "Cats don't need anyone else to give them a sense of security." "These results confirm the view that adult cats are typically quite independent, even in their social relationships," the authors write in the journal Plos One. Similarly, this kind of connection between dogs and their owners was proven.īut the cats and their owners failed the test. The method, called the "stranger situation test," checks whether the child feels securely bound to its mother, which indicates a healthy development in humans. Alice Potter and Daniel Simon Mills from the University of Lincoln in the UK examined 20 cats and their owners, using a method that was actually developed for small children. In 2015, a study found that the emotional attachment of cats to their owners is different from that of dogs and their owners. "They miss their owner, for example during a holiday stay - even if they may only give them the cold shoulder on their return." Cats are living in eight million German households. "Cats that have been socialized to humans as kittens develop genuine social relationships with their owners and do not regard them merely as can openers," he told DW. He is a Swiss-American biologist researching the relationship between humans and domestic cats, and director of the Institute for Applied Ethology and Animal Psychology he founded in Horgen, near Zurich. But Dennis Turner doesn't see it that way.
Dogs cling to their owners, cats only to one place. "Dogs have masters, cats have staff," goes a saying. But whatever greeting you get, it is never as enthusiastic as that displayed by a dog. If you are lucky, the cat might greet you at the door and lovingly circle around your legs a few times. And above all, that it isn't offended that you left it alone for so long. Instead, as a cat owner, you hope that the cat at least notices that you are back. For instance, when they come home and are not greeted with exuberant, tail-wagging joy. There are days when even the most convinced cat owners wish they had a dog instead.
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