What Are CATS Good For?
Posted: December 14th, 2005, 1:48 am
My cats did something GREAT for me last Thursday: they killed a MOUSE. And they did it without even waking me up!
The people who live above me have mice. They are not the best housekeepers and they had a bad habit of leaving the patio door open last summer. They have a dog too, and so they got mice. The mice live in their floor (my ceiling). The mice run through the heating ducts, steal a piece of dog food from the bowl by the heating vent, and then run back through the vent with it.
Well, it's gotten cold here, and I guess one of these brown mousies got bold and thought cat food would do just as well as dog food. He didn't live long. There wasn't a mark on him, but his neck was broken. I found him in the early morning and he was still limp, so I knew he'd been killed recently, but I never even heard a sound. Katy showed me the dead mouse, but nobody made a big deal about it. All in a day's work for a small group of cats ....
Good job, CATS!
This is why cats made friends with humans, and why humans decided to keep them on. When we got civilized, and began to plant and gather grain in large quantities, we attracted mice. The mice attracted cats. The mice ate our grain, but the cats ate the mice and kept their numbers down to manageable levels.
It's possible that, without cats, we'd still be meat-eating nomads. What's the point of harvesting and storing food if it gets eaten up or contaminated by rodents? Adopting cats into the human family solved the storage problem for grains, and as everyone knows, farming led to settled communities, civilizations with governments, art, writing, architecture, mathematics and so on.
I love dogs. Dogs are great. But what did dogs do to advance civilization? OK, they helped us pull down meat, and they did an excellent job of it, too. And then they helped us herd sheep and other animals. That was also a good contribution. They've assumed numerous tasks over thousands of years, and they've performed well in all of them, but it was CATS that allowed us to settle down and develop some culture.
My neighbors love their dog. He's cool. He does nothing, but he's cool. He doesn't guard, because he hasn't been trained to do it and he's a hunting dog by breed. He's like a big, hairy, drooling child.
While my neighbors are fussing with traps and poison, unsuccessfully, my cats have kept the mice AWAY from my home downstairs, just by being here. They dispatched the one brave mousie who ventured to cross the divide without even waking me. What's more, they efficiently expunged every insect in this place within a month after I moved in.
Dogs need to be trained for tasks. Cats can only be trained with great difficulty, but what they do by nature is far more practical and useful over the long term.
And besides, what DOG has ever used a litter box and covered his feces to hide the smell?
Not trying to diss dogs, necessarily, but cats have been underrated. Dogs have been given a lot of glory because they were the first animals to be domesticated by men. They get a lot of attention because they know how to appeal to human sympathies with their cute and clownish antics. They obey, and cats don't. But cats did us a HUGE service by ridding our food storage bins of mice, rats and insects. No other animal could have done that. It took a small, versatile, predator with little or no interest in our vegetarian foodstores to enable Man to settle into communities and develop some serious skills.
You can thank your cat for art. For literature. For politics and law. For supermarkets.
And check it out next time you drop a slice of bread and your dog eats it, but your cat doesn't.
The people who live above me have mice. They are not the best housekeepers and they had a bad habit of leaving the patio door open last summer. They have a dog too, and so they got mice. The mice live in their floor (my ceiling). The mice run through the heating ducts, steal a piece of dog food from the bowl by the heating vent, and then run back through the vent with it.
Well, it's gotten cold here, and I guess one of these brown mousies got bold and thought cat food would do just as well as dog food. He didn't live long. There wasn't a mark on him, but his neck was broken. I found him in the early morning and he was still limp, so I knew he'd been killed recently, but I never even heard a sound. Katy showed me the dead mouse, but nobody made a big deal about it. All in a day's work for a small group of cats ....
Good job, CATS!
This is why cats made friends with humans, and why humans decided to keep them on. When we got civilized, and began to plant and gather grain in large quantities, we attracted mice. The mice attracted cats. The mice ate our grain, but the cats ate the mice and kept their numbers down to manageable levels.
It's possible that, without cats, we'd still be meat-eating nomads. What's the point of harvesting and storing food if it gets eaten up or contaminated by rodents? Adopting cats into the human family solved the storage problem for grains, and as everyone knows, farming led to settled communities, civilizations with governments, art, writing, architecture, mathematics and so on.
I love dogs. Dogs are great. But what did dogs do to advance civilization? OK, they helped us pull down meat, and they did an excellent job of it, too. And then they helped us herd sheep and other animals. That was also a good contribution. They've assumed numerous tasks over thousands of years, and they've performed well in all of them, but it was CATS that allowed us to settle down and develop some culture.
My neighbors love their dog. He's cool. He does nothing, but he's cool. He doesn't guard, because he hasn't been trained to do it and he's a hunting dog by breed. He's like a big, hairy, drooling child.
While my neighbors are fussing with traps and poison, unsuccessfully, my cats have kept the mice AWAY from my home downstairs, just by being here. They dispatched the one brave mousie who ventured to cross the divide without even waking me. What's more, they efficiently expunged every insect in this place within a month after I moved in.
Dogs need to be trained for tasks. Cats can only be trained with great difficulty, but what they do by nature is far more practical and useful over the long term.
And besides, what DOG has ever used a litter box and covered his feces to hide the smell?
Not trying to diss dogs, necessarily, but cats have been underrated. Dogs have been given a lot of glory because they were the first animals to be domesticated by men. They get a lot of attention because they know how to appeal to human sympathies with their cute and clownish antics. They obey, and cats don't. But cats did us a HUGE service by ridding our food storage bins of mice, rats and insects. No other animal could have done that. It took a small, versatile, predator with little or no interest in our vegetarian foodstores to enable Man to settle into communities and develop some serious skills.
You can thank your cat for art. For literature. For politics and law. For supermarkets.
And check it out next time you drop a slice of bread and your dog eats it, but your cat doesn't.