Really?

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Is it puzzling that humans have pets?

Pets have long posed an evolutionary enigma for researchers. We have to feed them, house them, cut their toenails, clean their teeth and scratch behind their ears. A relationship like that could be considered a poor return on investment.

“Lavishing resources on members of other species we have no evolutionary stake in seems to make no evolutionary sense,” said Hal Herzog, a psychologist and animal expert at Western Carolina University who was not involved with the research. Yet many cultures across the world have pets and cherish them dearly.

Does it really seem to make no evolutionary sense?

The many practical reasons for having pets (rodent control, guarding, protection, assistance in hunting and so on) aside, doesn’t well-being/happiness make evolutionary sense?

Maybe this is just journalistic over-simplification of what makes evolutionary sense.

“There are theories that pet-keeping began either because animals were useful for tasks like hunting and protection or because humans have a natural tendency to care for and bond with other living beings,” said Zoë Goldsborough, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior who was not involved with the research.

Or both, ffs. Your dog can help with hunting and guard the pack and be a companion.

Maybe this is just drastically oversimplified for a broad audience, but it seems simplified to the point of absurdity.

Comments

15 responses to “Really?”

  1. Papito Avatar
    Papito

    I find it hard to believe that Herzog has ever had a cat. In my family we’ve always had cats, and only the last couple were ever purchased. In most cases, we didn’t adopt the cats, they adopted us. They just showed up one day and we made a deal – they would keep the mice away and we would feed and pet them. I’ve got two cats lazing about the house somewhere, and they have both proved themselves as mousers.

    Mice are a pain in the neck. If I didn’t have concrete, and refrigerators, and locking plastic bins to hold my dry goods, they would be a bigger pain in the neck. If I had a dirt floor and nothing but burlap sacks to hold my food, and no cats, then my house would be positively crawling with mice.

    Cats are obligate carnivores. They will not eat your corn, your rice, your wheat, or your beans. Mice will eat all those things. And cats will eat mice.

    There is no mystery here why people would want cats around. Only someone ignorant of both history and housekeeping would fail to understand.

    And “care for and bond with” seems like projection of modern bourgeois norms into the far past. Sure, some people are going to cut Fluffy’s nails, and take Fluffy to the vet, and buy Fluffy special food, and comb Fluffy, and treat Fluffy for fleas, and get Fluffy kidney surgery… but that just isn’t the way most people even today treat cats. I’m quite sure that if ancient man got to the bottom of the grain sack and game was scarce, he would just eat the cat.

  2. Piglet Avatar
    Piglet

    Also, the cats don’t even have to be all that good at killing mice. Mice that fail to understand the danger of sharp-clawed carnivorous predators tend not to live long enough to have offspring. If the cats just sort of hang out, so the mice can see and hear and smell them, that often works pretty well to scare the mice off.

  3. Julia F. Avatar
    Julia F.

    Just yesterday I saw an article on Facebook claiming that other primates appear to keep pets. It was illustrated with a picture of a group of monkeys grooming a dog. I didn’t read it. Was this excerpt from that article by any chance?

  4. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Julia, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the late Koko the gorilla, but she had a kitten she adored and cared for. So, yeah, other species will keep pets, and it’s possible other species besides primates, though I have no evidence on that either way.

    Other species keep slaves; why not pets?

  5. Lady Mondegreen Avatar
    Lady Mondegreen

    I sometimes think people get confused and think genes are — conscious and deliberate?

    I once argued with a friend about what’s called “altruism.” He said it’s a big puzzle, evolutionarily speaking, because it doesn’t help further our genes. My position was that it grew out of maternal care. Once you evolve complex, extended caring behavior — and the emotions that prompt it — it’s not surprising if your feelings and behavior extends to non-kin. Genes aren’t conscious. They can’t tell who’s related to you and who isn’t.

    Cats and dogs almost certainly started out hanging around us for our meat and stored grains. They got used to us and we got used to them. Then (simplifying here) we noticed that their babies are damn cute, with big, forward-facing eyes like those of our babies. And maybe they started to see us as pack members (dogs) or mothers or even big clumsy kittens (cats.)

    Affection is not really a big evolutionary mystery. Start with maternal care, and it expands from there.

  6. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Plus, as I mentioned in the post, just plain old wellbeing or happiness. There are survival advantages to wellbeing, right?

  7. Julia F. Avatar
    Julia F.

    Iknklast, thank you for reminding me of Koko. I read the book about her in the 80’s and saw the documentary. I clearly remember the kitten.

  8. Freemage Avatar
    Freemage

    Hell, even from the absurd notion of ‘conscious genes’, altruism and empathy make sense–most primates have a tribal structure, and caring for part of the tribe strengthens the whole of it, making the entire group more evolutionarily fit. Such groups are more adaptive, better able to handle a crisis, and just generally are more likely to survive multiple generations.

  9. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    I knew some gorillas personally, so Koko was fascinating to me.

  10. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    I once argued with a friend about what’s called “altruism.” He said it’s a big puzzle, evolutionarily speaking, because it doesn’t help further our genes.

    Except, of course, when it does. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism are not exactly new ideas. The Selfish Gene was published 50 years ago, and was mostly referring back to the work of R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane IIRC. I am less convinced by the “cuteness” or “pleasant company” arguments. It makes more sense to me to say that we evolved to enjoy the company of dogs and cats because they were useful to us

  11. Peter N Avatar
    Peter N

    It is generally believed that those wolves (and especially their puppies) that were genetically determined to be more tolerant of humans, and hung around human habitations, had an evolutionary advantage that eventually gave rise to the domestic dog: we created dogs through selective breeding. But there is a contrary hypothesis, that humans that were more inclined to coexist with wolves, and thus were able to benefit from wolves’ behavior such as collaborating on hunts and warning of intruders, were more successful than those humans who shunned wolves. If that was so, then dogs created us.

  12. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Peter N, I suspect it was a mutual thing. Wolves inclined to co-exist with humans meeting humans inclined to co-exist with wolves, and voila! Magic happens (not really magic, though, is it? No sky daddy, just plain old genetics coupled with environment to modify two species in mutually beneficial ways).

  13. Lady Mondegreen Avatar
    Lady Mondegreen

    It makes more sense to me to say that we evolved to enjoy the company of dogs and cats because they were useful to us

    I doubt it. Supposedly dogs were domesticated up to 30,000 years ago; cats a mere 10,000+ years ago. That’s very little time in evolutionary terms. It’s more likely that something about them triggered something in us that already evolved: our social brains.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4184794/

  14. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    And yet, when you look at how far the various breeds of dogs have left wolves behind (through artificial selection admittedly) in that same period…

  15. Lady Mondegreen Avatar
    Lady Mondegreen

    Yes, that’s artificial selection. Interesting thing: Somewhere I picked up the idea that canine DNA was especially variable, or something, compared to other animals, but turns out I was wrong. All that variation comes down to a small slice of their genome!

    https://pasadenahumane.org/did-you-know-that-dog-diversity-is-down-to-1-of-their-dna/

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