Nah, that’s not how it went down. Cats are such weirdos because they domesticated themselves instead of being domesticated by humans, and because they’re descended from a small species of wild cat that was both a predator species and a prey species.
Dogs and other domestic animals we molded to suit our purposes, but cats just kind of… showed up. The only selection pressure on them was “tolerate humans just enough to get at the rats in the humans’ granaries”. If anything, they domesticated us. Their meowing behavior is an attempt to mimic the cries of human babies.
Yeah. Domestic cats are barely different than wild cats. There are still several wild cat species you’d totally mistake for a weird housecat.
Dogs have some weird gene that lets them have extreme morphological variation. So of course humans abused the crap out of that.
The top cat is a saber-tooth whose population died out entirely because they didn’t do like the house cat’s ancestors did. So who’s laughing now?
