master manipulators

They rarely need to in the city, also those that weren't taught by other cats most of the time won't kill the mouse just torture it or scare.
- I feel like depends on the cat. I found mine as a list kitten that we assumed got outside and then was starving and almost dead. He's always been N indoor cat. Had never seen a mouse in the 8 years he was alive. I go out of town for a day and night and come back to a decapitated mouse in the apt. Fool took care of shit without even knowing. Then years later, we move into a house and a mouse gets in some how. My cat finds the mouse, kills it, walks around with it, then drops it in the hallway for us to clean up. If he had been taught how to catch mice when he was a kitten, I he wouldn't have been starving to death. But when a mouse showed up, he knew exactly what to do.
They -can- do that yes. Whether or not they will choose to, however, is anyone’s guess.
- They will have a joyous time with it. And you might find eviscerated mice under your couch one day. But my two dumbass fur balls just thought they were awesome toys.
  Never figured out quite when they stopped coming in. The only really humane way to kill em is snap traps. I probably went through a couple dozen of them before they stopped showing up.
  I was against using poisoned food traps because the last thing I wanted was my cat consuming a poisoned mouse. But, since our whole neighborhood had a problem with the mice, I wouldn't be too surprised if a neighbor did it.
How do you have so many mice?
Sounds like your apartment smells like leftovers; we had mice sometimes until we started to do dishes religiously and take out trash religiously. Or well, about as frequently as our parents do it.

Oh sure, when the cat walks into a house and wants to live there, they're all "omg it's so cute" and "let's go buy it food and a bed", but when I do it, they're all "who the hell are you?" and "leave or I'm calling the cops" :(

Have you tried meowing at them?
- don't do this. it only made things escalate in my experience

Humans are just exceptionally weak to cute. If aliens ever show up and try to conquer us, we're going to be so screwed if they happen to be adorable.

Speak for yourself, I hope the furry aliens make me their pet.
- Well, I guess you're getting screwed anyways
- I would love the life of a house pet as long as I can play video games instead of sleeping all the time.
  We just collectively need to convince our new overlords that it’s enrichment and just let me keep it I already have it, and I’ll be totally friendly and compliant whenever you want, I can pause, it’s cool.
- What's great is when they show up and become furry because they decide that furries have devised the best possible social system in the cosmos
Even if they were horrors beyond our comprehension, a whole lot of people would be still be very sexually aggressive towards them.
- Honestly that may be what saves us. They try to manipulate us by being cute, we weird them out by being horny.
There's a Philip K Dick short story about this, "The war with the Fnools"
If aliens turn up and they're like "Give me snacks. And a fluffy bed." I think we'd be like "...aight."
Too Cute crisis is about aliens coming to destroy earth but learn there are cats.

I never liked cats at all and one did exactly that. Stupid fuck make me fall absolutely in love with it too.

Get another one from the shelter! They have much richer lives if they have another cat to interact with, even if they don't like each other.
Plus having two cats is getting yourself twice the cute and love for very little extra work.
Edit - doesn't this look great?
- Be careful, it looks like they're trying to merge and create a Cat King in that first picture!
- Are they paying you or something??

The fact that only two creature in this world that will approach another creature 10 times bigger than them just so they get adopted is pretty impressive. That's how i adopted my 4th cat, little baby dude just came out from under a car and yell at me until i pick him up.

My (future) cat jumped up on my car when I parked! Almost named her Engine...

That makes it sound like the cat domesticated humanity not "The cat self domesticated itself"

in reality it sure as fuck seems like humanity domesticated humanity, we have a lot of domesticated features like neotony (we look strikingly like chimpanzee children) and we're arguably the most ludicrously social species on earth.
the ironic thing is that cats aren't really very domesticated, they're inherently a social animal and happen to just sorta fit with how humans work.
- Note though, that neoteny is a disputed theory and (if at all) only part of human evolution.
  Sad that the Wikipedia article is a mess now.
- I mean that sounds more like those are just traits we have and we made domesticated animals have similar traits to out own since presumably that makes us get along better.

They are funny, don't really need a lot of space and training, and look pretty. Ofc I will go and by whatever.

Lost opportunity to say "I live here meow"

I keep meowing at hot guys at the bar and none have taken me home yet 😭

Meow at the moderately acceptably good (minus minus) looking and you may have some luck... but please don't get offended if we start pspspspsing you, it's just a reflex
Did you try letting them scratch under your collar?
Works better on girls.
- I'm gay
- Can confirm, purring is a sure way I can get attention from my gf

Did cats domesticate humans, or did Toxoplasma gondii domesticate both of us?

Even with toys they are invading our space

https://i.vgy.me/Xb93ue.gif

Once they figure out email and posting on social media we're really screwed.
- As you see, it is on the way

They don't even meow to each other, just to humans. They know what they are about.

No, they do sometimes. Some meow in greeting to each other, as seen on cat cams.
they do sometimes do really low meows to intimidate other cats

When I was a kid Mr Kitty unilaterally moved in despite belonging to the neighbors across the street and the stern objections of my father armed with a squirt gun.

There's been a little baby girl coming around here, underweight, some kind of skin problem. She has always been an outside cat and belonged to my neighbor who died. My wife says we already have four so we can't bring a street cat in that's going to fight them.
She's right, but sometimes little girl comes up when I'm smoking and gets warm laying in my lap and I want to keep her so much.

I went to disagree untill I remembered there's a ginger cat that lives on my property that I feed sometimes

please don't feed it unless you know for sure it's homeless (there are paper bands you can hang around their necks on which you can put your info so that the owner can call you if it's their cat). if the cat has a owner then you're making the cat too fat, probably buying the wrong food which will give it liver disease, and being fed 2 different foods can cause bowel problems. Please stop.
- Imma feed him when he comes in and screams at me everytime because I like him and he's cool.
- Isn't it weird how some people care more about cats than people or, often, themselves?

"Everybody wants to talk about X, nobody wants to talk about Y".
That's not gaslighting, that's whataboutism.

I think it's more along the lines of cats gaslighting humans to care for them....that's where I grew the comparison.
- That isn't what gaslighting is, though. Gaslighting isn't simply emotional manipulation; it's a specific kind.

I love all cats, and they are free to walk inside anytime they want. Just no fighting in the house.

The cat that walked into my house and said "I live here meow."

Cats never domesticated themself, since ever they are specialists in domesticate humans, for commodity, not for need.

Spot on. Cats are the OG scientists who stuck around to see what they could make us do after they discovered monkeys gave good tummy rubs.
Yadda-yadda, we industrialize food production and build awesome cozy dens to live in, yadda-yadda, they're watching us burn the world like, "fascinating... now, can I make the monkey give me treats 2 minutes earlier than this time last week..."
Only reason they don't have us outright worshipping them is we tried it once or twice, but things got weird.

Cats after entering a human stranger's house: Look at me. I'm the meowner now.

Humans: Yes, oh cute one!

The ho-meow-ner, at that.

So cats are successful squatters?

Yeah but we chop their balls off soon after. I don't think it works out evolutionarily.

Their many siblings in the wild shall provide the young

Nah, I assume it's more like some unconscious dude shows up at your house with a weirdly sharp penis, he impregnates the house, and then the house explodes and a bunch of little dudes spill out.
i guess that viruses might be evolutionarily very old, dating back to the RNA-world-episode, seeing how primitive they are.
maybe they could have a use (exchanging DNA segments between individuals) but that is pure speculation on my part.