(a sharp distinction from Sniffles the teacup poodle. I don’t care if you think you’re happy, this would not please the prowling wolves of the stone age.)
This is indeed very much the obvious failure mode! Discovering that an alien species has bred a group of humans into what a pug is to a wolf would be absolutely horrific.
Moreover the path between utopia and “lovecraftian horror” seems pretty fragile? I don’t know exactly what property cats had that made the shoggoth take the good one (mostly, maybe except for those flat-faced Persian and hairless Sphynxes) for them, and it’s plausible it was just a lucky combination of minor stuff (harder to selectively breed, different social niche, different types of people liking cats) that won’t be stable/generalize in extremis.
It’s probably simply that dogs were very useful and cats only marginally so. Dogs were useful for hunting and guarding and were more social to begin with, so people invested more resources in shaping them to various practical purposes. Cats aren’t expected to do work beyond hunting pests (which they already do on their own with gusto) and be cute. We even forgive them when they’re being annoying little shits, which is very often.
And to be fair, we did modify cats a bit too. Maine Coons and Persians and Scottish Folds aren’t natural (and all suffer from this or that genetic condition because of it). And we do sterilise them because at this point their population is completely out of whack for such an efficient little carnivorous death machine. So, not 100% an ideal case study. But honestly the closest example we have of what we would like for us: still afforded reasonable freedom, cared well about, catered to without major trade-offs in terms of demands. But again, it worked on us because cats just happened to tickle our baby-circuits.
Until quite recently, modification of dogs was to make them specialized workers. The teacup poodle was created as a pet, but the standard poodle was created for duck hunting. That doesn’t seem a terrible fate.
I don’t see how usefulness explains which animals were bred frivolously. I guess the long experience breeding dogs for work could turn into breeding dogs for appearance, but in the 19th century there was frivolous breeding of pigeons, which had previously been bred for food.
The Scottish fold and (American) Persian cat were directly selected for appearance and their health problems are directly related to that feature. Maine coons seem to be natural (“landrace”). Their sixth toes and health problems might be the result of a population bottleneck 400 years ago, or the rapid selection for a new environment, but they were brought for work. I don’t know about their friendliness. It makes sense that someone would breed for that for pets, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Rag dolls going limp when held seems disturbing to me. The one I met seemed more frozen with fear than happy with humans.
I don’t see how usefulness explains which animals were bred frivolously. I guess the long experience breeding dogs for work could turn into breeding dogs for appearance, but in the 19th century there was frivolous breeding of pigeons, which had previously been bred for food.
It’s less about frivolousness and more about specialisation. We made dogs to pull sleds, dogs to hunt mice in mines, dogs to follow rabbits in their burrows, dogs that run fast, dogs that herd sheep, dogs that are good at killing people, dogs that are good at killing other dogs, and so on so forth.
This level of high specialisation just doesn’t seem to be achievable with cats, and we never even tried. We simply let them do their business, which happened to be the one job we wanted them to do. But dogs are very good at communicating with us, and so it became useful to also select them (fine-tune them?) for a lot of different tasks, which produced all the morphological variety we have now. But because if you optimise hard enough for one thing you often throw everything else under the bus, highly specialised dogs are also generally less healthy than wild wolves. Though it’s true that since they were needed for work, they couldn’t be too prone to dying easily, so health did factor a bit int the objective function there.
As you say similar things did happen to cats, who were mostly only bred for cuteness, but because the breeding was limited, less long and less transformative, it’s generally not as big an issue in purely quantitative terms; most cats in the world today are still just “normal” cats, which genetically don’t differ much from their wild ancestors.
This is indeed very much the obvious failure mode! Discovering that an alien species has bred a group of humans into what a pug is to a wolf would be absolutely horrific.
Moreover the path between utopia and “lovecraftian horror” seems pretty fragile? I don’t know exactly what property cats had that made the shoggoth take the good one (mostly, maybe except for those flat-faced Persian and hairless Sphynxes) for them, and it’s plausible it was just a lucky combination of minor stuff (harder to selectively breed, different social niche, different types of people liking cats) that won’t be stable/generalize in extremis.
This is the cynical view on agriculture.
It’s probably simply that dogs were very useful and cats only marginally so. Dogs were useful for hunting and guarding and were more social to begin with, so people invested more resources in shaping them to various practical purposes. Cats aren’t expected to do work beyond hunting pests (which they already do on their own with gusto) and be cute. We even forgive them when they’re being annoying little shits, which is very often.
And to be fair, we did modify cats a bit too. Maine Coons and Persians and Scottish Folds aren’t natural (and all suffer from this or that genetic condition because of it). And we do sterilise them because at this point their population is completely out of whack for such an efficient little carnivorous death machine. So, not 100% an ideal case study. But honestly the closest example we have of what we would like for us: still afforded reasonable freedom, cared well about, catered to without major trade-offs in terms of demands. But again, it worked on us because cats just happened to tickle our baby-circuits.
Until quite recently, modification of dogs was to make them specialized workers. The teacup poodle was created as a pet, but the standard poodle was created for duck hunting. That doesn’t seem a terrible fate.
I don’t see how usefulness explains which animals were bred frivolously. I guess the long experience breeding dogs for work could turn into breeding dogs for appearance, but in the 19th century there was frivolous breeding of pigeons, which had previously been bred for food.
The Scottish fold and (American) Persian cat were directly selected for appearance and their health problems are directly related to that feature. Maine coons seem to be natural (“landrace”). Their sixth toes and health problems might be the result of a population bottleneck 400 years ago, or the rapid selection for a new environment, but they were brought for work. I don’t know about their friendliness. It makes sense that someone would breed for that for pets, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Rag dolls going limp when held seems disturbing to me. The one I met seemed more frozen with fear than happy with humans.
It’s less about frivolousness and more about specialisation. We made dogs to pull sleds, dogs to hunt mice in mines, dogs to follow rabbits in their burrows, dogs that run fast, dogs that herd sheep, dogs that are good at killing people, dogs that are good at killing other dogs, and so on so forth.
This level of high specialisation just doesn’t seem to be achievable with cats, and we never even tried. We simply let them do their business, which happened to be the one job we wanted them to do. But dogs are very good at communicating with us, and so it became useful to also select them (fine-tune them?) for a lot of different tasks, which produced all the morphological variety we have now. But because if you optimise hard enough for one thing you often throw everything else under the bus, highly specialised dogs are also generally less healthy than wild wolves. Though it’s true that since they were needed for work, they couldn’t be too prone to dying easily, so health did factor a bit int the objective function there.
As you say similar things did happen to cats, who were mostly only bred for cuteness, but because the breeding was limited, less long and less transformative, it’s generally not as big an issue in purely quantitative terms; most cats in the world today are still just “normal” cats, which genetically don’t differ much from their wild ancestors.
Makes me think of All Tomorrows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imNtSPM3-r4