Tasmanian devil expert, artist, and conservationist Bill Flowers opines about the cat versus the dog.
I very much appreciate Flowers’s work with native Tasmanian fauna, but he’s way off base here.
He claims that dogs are inbred.
Well, they are.
But Tasmanian devils are even more so.
And devils are as an entire population.
Dogs are not inbred as an entire population.
Dogs are only inbred within closed registry breeds.
Dogs were not domesticated by inbreeding wolves. That’s something I hear all the time.
It’s not what happened. Dogs were actually found to have retained roughly 94 percent of their genetic diversity through the first “domestication event.” However, the bulk of the studies on dog nuclear DNA strongly suggest that there was no dog domestication event. There was a dog domestication process that happened throughout Eurasia over tens of thousands of years.
Dogs are also not “retarded” or “developmentally delayed” wolves. This notion can be traced to Raymond Coppinger’s work on neoteny. Dogs are not neotenous wolves. All of their bizarre shapes come from selective breeding by humans, not some magical juvenilzation process. The same can be said about their behavior. There have always been wolves that haven’t read the books and have behaved just like dogs when imprinted or otherwise socialized to humans. They are morphologically and genetically wild wolves, so neoteny can’t be used to describe why these wolves are friendly. And within certain breeds, there are feral dog temperaments– most notably in the azawakh. These dogs don’t look like wolves, but they bond to just a few people and are very emotionally reactive. They look just like regular azawakh.
Further, we have all of these cognitive studies that have compared wolves and dogs, and they have found that dogs have certain cognitive abilities that wolves lack.
Cats actually lack these abilities. A recent study showed that the cat species have focused upon evolving for great jaw strength and power, while dog species have focused upon developing more complex and larger brains in order to live in complex family groups.
From a biodiversity standpoint, cats are a bigger problem than dogs. Dogs can be taught to leave wildlife alone. It’s not difficult, but cats are much harder to work with. Dogs normally aren’t allowed to roam, but cats usually are. And cats kill $17 billion in damages to birds and other small wildlife in the United States.
In Australia, cats are much worse. In Tasmania, they are even more so, for Tasmania has been the last refuge for all sorts of birds, small marsupials, and other wildlife that has since gone extinct on the mainland. Tasmania has feline free zones for that very reason.
Of course, dogs do eat more meat, but what they eat is mostly leftovers from carcasses that we don’t eat. Dogs do attack native wildlife, and they are a problem in some areas. But I guarantee you that dogs are less of a problem to native wildlife around the world than cats.
Part of it is because dogs have to learn how to use their innate predatory motor patterns. With cats, it’s an instinct. That’s why dogs scavenge when they are abandoned, and it is very hard for them to maintain self-sustaining feral populations. That’s not to say they don’t, but in the United States, there aren’t as many feral dogs running about as there are feral cats– by a very great magnitude.
When I see a cat, I see an animal that is being domesticated. It’s really a little wild animal that happens to live near people, but now it’s a pet. It’s just like the Norway rat, which is also becoming a popular pet through selective breeding.
When I see a dog, I see a creature my species co-evolved with. It’s an animal that truly wants to be in our space and in our lives. It considers us to be its true social unit, and it wishes to live with people in a truly intimate way in which no other species can.
Cats can try, but although they are not truly solitary, they aren’t nearly as social as dogs are. And that will prevent them from ever becoming dogs. They will always be ersatz dogs to me.
Personally, if were chosing an ersatz dog, I’d get a pet Norway rat.
They require less care than cats, but they are as closely bonded to people as any dog.
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By the way, did anyone catch the irony of a Tasmanian devil lover calling domestic dogs inbred?
I have both cats and dogs. Sometimes I appreciate that my cats are not as emotionally needy as my dogs. I love that my dogs will go on hikes, runs, and other adventures with me though.
I was talking about these differences between my cats and dogs with a friend and he thought it would be cool if there was a domestic breed of cat that was more the size of a standard domestic dog, maybe 35-55 pounds. I thought about all the accidenal scratches and play maulings a 10-17 pound cat gives and I realized a dog-sized cat would be more dangerous than a similar sized dog, especially to children. Yes, there are extemely gentle cats out there, but in my experience, they are the minority. Imagine the impact they would have on the environment.
Just as you said, cats are more like a wild animal, many of their instincts are still intact. It wil be interesting to see how this changes as pure bred cats become more popular.