Jonathan B. Losos
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jonathan B. Losos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And in fact, they form groups that are very similar to the prides of lions, that lions are famous for living in groups that are composed of related females. And these females are extremely friendly to each other. They groom each other. They lie on top of each other. They actually help raise each other's young.
And the males, when they grow up, they leave the pride, but the females stay put, so they're all related. And it turns out that in places where there's a lot of food, cats will occur at high densities. And that food might be because people are just putting food out for them, as happens in many places around the US and elsewhere.
Or it may be in places where, like fishing villages, where there are big piles of scraps that the cats eat. But in any case, the plentitude of food allows the cats to occur at a high density. And they live in groups that are very similar to lion prides. They're groups of related females that are very friendly to each other. They groom each other. They help raise their young.
They even sometimes serve as a midwife and help during the birth of the kittens. And so they are very friendly to each other. Now, there will be multiple groups of cats in one place, and they're not friendly at all to members of other groups, but they are friendly to their own groups. So under some circumstances, cats can actually be very friendly to each other. One last thing.
There are some breeds of cats that have been developed that are extremely affectionate, almost could be mistaken for dogs in ways. And so cats do have that possibility, but it has to be brought out.
Well, the lion is actually the only wild species of cat that does that, that lives in groups. The cheetah is somewhat of an exception. Brothers will band together to try to control the territory and work together to control the territory and mate with the females within it. But with that exception, there are no other wild species of cat that live in groups.
And so the fact that the domestic cat does this, at least under some circumstances, is really an interesting parallel. It's really true social living in groups and friendliness. It's only the domestic cat and the lion.
Well, I want to answer that at two timescales. Going way back in time, the first archaeological evidence of cats and humans living together is about 10,000 years ago from an archaeological site in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean near Turkey. But we don't know if that was a domesticated cat or just a wild cat that that had become somewhat tame.
We do know that cats were domesticated by the time of the Egyptian civilizations, that 3,500 years ago, we can see paintings on tomb walls and sculptures that clearly reveal cats living in a domesticated way, wearing collars and going on outings with the family and eating food underneath the table and so on. So historically, cats really became pets Certainly by the time of the Egyptians.
And the question is, did it actually happen in Egypt or did it happen somewhere else? And then the cats came to Egypt. And we don't know the answer to that. More recently, a key development in the interaction of people and cats was the development of kitty litter, which was only invented in the 1940s. And before that time,
The possibility of having a cat that just lived indoor all the time was very difficult. And so most cats were indoor outdoor cats. And as a result, we're not as intimate family members oftentimes as cats are today. But since the advent of kitty litter, that's really changed the ability of people to have cats as as pets that stay inside all the time.
Well, they're very smart. Cats are very smart animals, as are dogs. And we could get into this argument back and forth. It's a little bit of apples and oranges because it's hard to directly compare the two animals. And in particular, part of the reason it's hard is
Because of dogs' nature, it's easy to do experiments where you can test how quickly they learn because they love being rewarded, particularly with attention and affection. And so it's easy to train a cat, sorry, to do an experiment to see how a dog... how quickly it can figure things out.
Cats can be a little more difficult to do these experiments, but people have done them, and it turns out cats are just as smart as dogs, you know, as a chauvinist, I'd say even smarter than dogs, but they're certainly very smart. They do know their names. They can tell when the person they live with is talking to them as opposed to talking to another person. They can be trained, actually.
There are whole books on this, and it's not actually that hard. It's the same principle that you train a dog. You just reward them for the behaviors that you would like them to perform, and the reward is food. Cats are very food-oriented. So overall, cats, cats are very smart. They can figure things out and they understand their names and other and other.
You know, you can do many different tests and they show that they're very smart animals.
Yeah. All the time. Cats are even more so because dogs sometimes will settle for affection and sometimes cats will. But if you really want a cat to do something, give the cat a treat.
I would have to agree with you. That is a great story. I have heard some stories like that. It does happen. Cats and dogs are renowned for returning to their old homes when people move. That's very well established. But I've heard of stories of dogs and cats showing up several years later, just as you described.
There's an interesting, if I can take a tangent to that story, people, researchers have started
studying pet cats to see what they do when they go outside and now in the united states most people don't let their cats out but some people do and it's more common in other countries and so the way they research this is um one of two ways they either put a little tracking device on the cat and you can then these days you can just follow it where the cat is doing on your computer or even your your cell phone and you get very accurate readings of where the cat is
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