Cats can do things when they feel like it, but dogs do it better, with enthusiasm and charm. Over and Over.

(A bit dog centric, here, but we have cats around the place too and they are fun. Cats will take out snakes, which helps protect the dogs, as I ALWAYS have my dogs desnaked.)

Fair Winds

Cap’n Jan

For wodun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auHXg1H0bAQ

Yes, but it is a bad one.

I’m taking the “conquer the world,” thing’ to be more metaphorical & descriptive of their geographical reach across space and time. (No thumbs, they can’t operate our Control Panels.)

Border Collie herding a Cat
https://youtu.be/Juj9EE8wBhY
(2:21)
–maybe…I’m not entirely convinced myself.

Given the freedom to act, dogs are very good at hunting/working in a general sense. They don’t need to be bred to unlock this potential and mutts can be successful at many different tasks. When dogs are bred for something, it is for a highly specialized task. This doesn’t mean they suck at everything else though or were poor at a task until bred for it.

That there are so many breeds doesn’t mean that dogs were unsuccessful in their original form but were so successful that they were used for more than one purpose. That cats had one purpose, largely irrelevant for many current owners, doesn’t really speak to evolutionary success.

Larson has done similar work with ancient dog DNA. “It’s great that cats are the getting same long deserved treatment,” he says of the new paper. “It’s kind of strange it’s taken this long given the general interest in cats.”

It is because cats, in general, are not that important. They had one job but now they are mostly companions that take very little effort to care for. But even as pets, people have paid little attention to breeding cats. Is this good or bad for cats? Tough to say but it shows a general lack of importance to humans even in their main role of companion.

Conquer the world is a bit of an overstatement. Tolerated enough to tag along while humans and other more contributing animals conquered the world is more like it.

Did you run this past your cat before posting?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/

I think an apt description of this “syndrome” is what I call the Disease of Celebrity. They all seem to get it, the younger it happens the worse it is. The more ‘famous’, the worse it gets. They all seem to loose their minds unless they, like the article says, are able to stay grounded.

Our President is already deeply infected with the Disease of Celebrity, and now he feels he has unlimited political power on top of that. He is steadily loosing contact with, and his grasp of, the real world with every passing day!

I can’t see him lasting two years before he has a complete mental breakdown. Spending all your time surrounded by sycophants; Spending day and night yelling at the TV or following every silly thing on twitter surely will have a detrimental effect on his mental health.