In this video we see a mouse chasing a domestic cat. It appears to me that the cat is genuinely being chased and not playing. The cat wants to get away from the mouse while the mouse is persistently chasing him/her. Why is it happening? It almost seems that the cat has lost his soul. He has completely lost an essential element in his character, the major element of a domestic cat’s character which is the ability to hunt. Domestic cats are top level predators and wonderful hunters. And here we see the primary prey of the domestic cat turning the tables completely and becoming a predator. Or that is what it looks like.
I must say that it is baffling. My first impression is that this cat and mouse may be buddies. We know that there are many examples of domestic cats being buddies with unusual species of animal because they were raised together. Therefore perhaps the mouse wants to play and the cat doesn’t. It may be as simple as that. However, I don’t believe that this is the reason.
An alternative scenario is that the cat has genuinely lost his soul! He has lost his ability to hunt his primary prey. He has lost something which he should have inherited in his genes and be passing on in the same way (if he wasn’t neutered or if she wasn’t spayed). I think this is unlikely. Cats instinctively know what a mouse looks like and how to catch it. Domestic cats are sometimes frightened of unusual objects. A lot of us are aware of the cucumber stunt. This is when a person puts a cucumber behind a domestic cat while he’s eating and then when he turns around to see the cucumber he becomes terrified. This is because the object is strange and maybe threatening. It may be alive in the eyes of the cat and so he runs as a defensive measure.
Perhaps domestication will gradually erode the innate, inherited skills of the domestic cat so one day all domestic cats will be like this one: running away from prey. You could say that this is already happening 10,000 years after the first domestic cat appeared.
There is another possibility and it is perhaps the most likely. Mice infected with toxoplasmosis lose their instinctive fear of the smell of cats. The effect may be permanent. It seems that the parasite permanently alters a specific brain function in mice. Toxoplasma gondii removes the rodent’s innate fear of cats. This has been established in research. This loss of fear remains even months after infection. There may be a permanent structural change. Most infected mice are mildly attracted to the scent of a cat.
This brings us to a lot of discussion, some months ago, about the alleged dramatic effect that toxoplasmosis has on humans causing behavioural changes and schizophrenia. Many people don’t believe this. After all there are millions of cat owners. If there was a real ongoing risk that cat owners would develop schizophrenia from their cat’s poo I think we would have heard a lot more about it by now. There would be hundreds of thousands of schizophrenic cat owners running around half crazed causing mayhem but alas no, this is not what is happening. It is more likely that schizophrenic people are prone to picking up the parasite rather than the parasite causing schizophrenia.
Anyway, to return to the mouse chasing the cat. My preference as to the reason why this happening is that the cat is not buddies with the mouse but unsure about the mouse’s presence and therefore she has lost, on this occasion, her predatory instincts or her desire to hunt. It is impossible to judge whether the mouse has been infected with toxoplasmosis.
The reason why I believe that these two are not friends is because the woman of the house, the cat’s owner I will presume, is herself fearful of the mouse or at least she gives that impression. She lets out a couple of screams especially at the end. This indicates that she is not used to having the mouse around her home which then precludes the possible scenario that the mouse was raised with the cat. Also it seems to me that the video was made in the Middle East or perhaps North Africa. I am making this judgement from the appearance of the kitchen and by the name of the videomaker. In these countries it would be unlikely that a person would raise a cat and a mouse together to ensure that they became friends.
The difference is NOT small in terms of physical and physiological selection-derived character STATES. I’m not talking behavior here in terms of the physical RESULTS, although they derive (usually unintended) from behavioral SELECTION (by humans).
Here is a simple example of how it occurred, and which relates directly to the separation of killing and feeding impulses which is a PHYSICAL character of Felis catus’ brain:
In any given litter of kittens during this process, those which could be more easily induced to remain around human dwellings were kept. Those which could not were killed–in the old days usually by drowning. Those which were better “mousers” than their litter-mates were kept, those which were not were killed. Those more amenable to being fed unwanted human food scraps were kept, those not so much were killed–and so on.
This is what is meant by SELECTION, and that’s ALWAYS what it means, whether we’re talking the Darwinian model of wild populations’ micro-evolution or that purposely carried out by humans breeding for desired characteristics, be they behavioral or phenotypical (or both). Selection always involves CULLING, whether “natural” or human-engendered.
The interesting thing, and it’s been demonstrated repeatedly, is that BEHAVIORAL-driven selection produces unintentional PHYSICAL and PHYSIOLOGICAL changes in the animal undergoing selection. Secondary to selecting for tractability (i.e. “tameness”) in dogs we see unintended PHYSICAL changes–the ancient wolf/golden jackal hybrids during the process of such behavioral selection lost their long snouts, upright ears and large teeth through “paedomorphism”–unintended retention of “puppy” characteristics in adult animals.
What’s really interesting is that such profound changes could have, and have been, achieved in as little as HALF a CENTURY. As previously mentioned, the Russians did so with gray foxes. The normal response of a gray fox upon sighting a human is to flee. The Russians bred foxes to welcome human companionship on the one hand, and to viciously attack them on the other. In 50 years they got selectively bred paedomorphic animals–short muzzels, floppy ears, small teeth etc. in the “friendly” strain (which tended to pee when they were excited), and debased, psychotic “attack foxes” from the opposite strain–in only five decades.
An analogous physical process resulting from deliberate behavioral selection for compulsive killing of small moving things in cats was the “segregation”, if you will, of the killing and feeding impulses in F. catus’ brain, such that it killed by reflex. This has been demonstrated experimentally:
In one study confined hungry cats were fed bowls of cat-food. As they were eating, rodents were released in the enclosure. The cats stopped eating, quickly killed the rodents, then resumed eating their cat-food. They showed no further interest in the dead rodents. The killing behavior was REFLEXIVE, unrelated to the cats’ state of hunger, and was triggered by a different region of the brain than that which governed feeding.
To re-emphasize as simply as I can, since you asked me to describe the process, SELECTION means KILLING. Those which survive do so because they exhibit the desired “behavioral” traits.
In many cases, such as in cats and dogs, these desired behavioral traits are linked to changes in physical character states.
Another example is F. catus’ loss of molars, because the “selected” forms were induced to stay around human dwellings and accept low-protein diets offered by humans. Shearing molars aren’t needed to lap milk from a bowl.
Will Australian “super-ferals” regrow their molars? I hope they’re all destroyed before we learn the answer to that.
In behaviorally-driven selection, behavior-modification was the intended result–the accompanying physical changes weren’t. They were nonetheless the means whereby desired behavioral changes were permanently fixed in these genetically-modified “domesticated” species.
This is why domesticated cats kill when they’re not hungry. Their wild relatives don’t do this.
Describe it. You keep saying it but don’t describe exactly what it is. Are you saying that the cats selective breed themselves? Sure cats select partners that improve survival but it is over 10k years and without the usual challenges that wild cats face. And the difference between the domestic cat and African wild cat is quite small in terms of character. And so it should be because 10k years is a short time. The wild cat has been around for how long? A million years?
They’re all the PRODUCT of this process, so they’re QUITE relevant to my argument. It applies to EVERY specimen of Felis catus on the planet, “purebred” or not, whether it’s an Australian “super-feral”, a member of a “community” cat colony in a New York playground, a “barn” cat on a Minnesota dairy farm, a stray cat fed at a Turkish restaurant back door, a neighbor’s cat taking a dump in my daughter’s vegetable garden or a perfumed Persian pussy-cat perched on a pillow being fed fresh fillets of mountain trout in some rich old lady’s boudoir, they are ALL Felis catus, and as such ALL their ancestors underwent the intense behavioral-driven selective breeding and ruthless culling which MADE them so, and which has GENETICALLY FIXED F. catus’ character states which now differentiate them from F. sylvestris at the species level. And said character states, repeatedly listed in this discussion, provide the concrete evidence whereby I make this argument:
(1) ALL F. catus lack the shearing molars of F. sylvestris.
(2) ALL F. catus have longer large intestines, and are better able to digest fats than F. sylvestris.
(3) ALL F. catus have smaller cranial capacity than F. sylvestris.
(4) ALL F. catus’ killing and feeding instincts are governed by separate regions of their brains, which has transformed ALL F. catus into the reflex-killers they are today. This is why the combined results of two studies of 85 WELL-FED unconfined “pet” cats found that on average they torture and slaughter 64 native rodents, 57 native birds and 68 native reptiles per cat/per year.
(5) I have, ready-to-hand, links to the scientific reports based on experimental studies which substantiate every statement made in (1) through (4) above, and more.
I said nothing about purebred vs. random-breeding cats in this context. The ancestors of ALL of them went through the above-described selection process long before any of the “fancy” breeds which you say represent 0.01% of the population existed.