Somewhere in an alternate universe raccoons don't go apeshit when they hit puberty, and foxes aren't obnoxiously loud and piss everywhere. And they are just your spicy flavour of home pets.
Alternate timeline: “You can’t have them because they’re unpredictable and might claw your eyes out without provocation.”
This timeline: “WTF happened to you?”
“My cat decided to wake me up by clawing my eyes out.”
“Hahaha!”
This is one of the things I don't understand about people who think having tigers as "pets" is a good idea. I've had a cat randomly decided to latch on to my arm, claws, teeth, and all a few times. Not a lot. Just a few. Obviously I was fine. Now imagine this house cat weighs 450 lbs. Not super confident that I'm going to be fine in that scenario.
I feel like the standard zookeeper line would be "because these are apex predators, and their presence would have an incredibly adverse effect on any ecosystem they're introduced to".
I literally experience this when I see bears. Where's our cute tiny bear species that is happy as a pet? I want my microbear!
Good news. Bears are the same order as Dogs: Dogs are your Microbears!
The order is Carnivora. So by your logic, cats are microbears too. Not a bad attempt, but I don't think that's satisfying enough for bear lovers. You're right they are more related to dogs than to cats (superfamily Canoidea), but that's still not enough. We need an Ursidae pet, that's the only way.
I need at least same-genus to be satisfied. Dogs aren't bear enough to sate my micro-bear wants.
I was at the Calgary Zoo last week and I watched a blonde bear being hunted relentlessly by two darker bears. The consensus was that they were playing and everyone was having a good laugh, but the longer it went on, the less the blonde bear appeared to be having fun. But the darker bears just kept going. I couldn't help but wonder, what if the blonde bear was going to be eaten by the other bears, and he's just trapped in this exhibit, doomed to run perpetual circles until he finally collapses and gets ripped apart by the others?
I don't know where the fuck I was going with this one. I just wanted to rescue that blonde bear from his cruel friends. Maybe he'd make a good candidate for a housebear. I didn't get a photo of him, but I did manage to snap this awkward pic of a meerkat.
"God invented cats so we could have a little tiger to pet."
Victor Hugo
"I swear that North American Puppy at the zoo wanted me to rub its belly, if it weren't for the glass! We had a connection, I could just tell, I'm not crazy!"
Yeah, and then there were allergies. Fuck allergies.
I have cat allergies and still can't help it. I've been forced to learn extremely good cleaning habits, as a plus.
Glad you're able to enjoy cats! It's not an option for everyone as severity varies.
I like to imagine in another reality, we ride lions and Panthers. And also for some reason have miniature horses.
Now you've said that I want a real life, living horse that I could put in my pocket. Imagine everyone carrying around their pocket horse, getting them out for tiny races, slipping them a blade of grass to munch on, whimsical as fuck
Basically a rabbit with inverted body proportions
Feel like id step on them
accidentally
Battlecat.
I'd be surprised if we didn't
I totally love the energy of the poster in OPs image, it's so warm and wholesome.
That said, it's probably true that cats (and dogs for that matter) have a variety of coat patterns because of domestication. Not only do humans choose to breed pets for their coat variations, selecting for tamer, friendlier animals actually also just introduces a variety of differences from their wild counterparts. Coat color is one of them.
https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/197/3/795/5935921?login=false
But the [related traits from domestication] as a whole, with its diverse array of affected morphological traits, clearly cannot be caused simply by alterations of adrenal function. What, therefore, might be the common factor? What all of these diverse traits, including the adrenals, share is that their development is closely linked to neural crest cells (NCCs). NCCs are the vertebrate-specific class of stem cells that first appear during early embryogenesis at the dorsal edge (“crest”) of the neural tube and then migrate ventrally throughout the body in both the cranium and the trunk, giving rise to the cellular precursors of many cell and tissue types and indirectly promoting the development of others (Carlson 1999; Hall 1999; Gilbert 2003; Trainor 2014).
Edit: the adrenal gland is mentioned here because lessening the function of the "flight or flight" response appears to makes friendlier animals with better temperament for domestication. The idea is that domestic animals were selected for temperament first, and everything else is less important (why would you keep an animal that won't stop biting you?).
Yeah; I don't have the spoons to give a supporting link but I remember that being borne out in the fox-domestication experiment, as well (along with other traits that seemed to align with the domestication process – as well –, such as floppy, folded ears); same reason domesticated cattle have developed spots.
This one got me for a minute.
This is for every pet. We don’t deserve them.
I do
Edit: I bet you do too.
Thanks for that :)
