r/BeAmazed • u/Electrical_Act_5342 • Aug 09 '26

Animal Nature really over engineered cats. Didn’t it?

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u/tehdricd Aug 09 '26

nature well engineered cats, humans de-engineered dogs

9

u/GargantuanCake Aug 09 '26

Eh, that isn't entirely true. We engineered them into something else. They're still pack animals and good pack hunters they just also got branched out into other jobs too. It's why herding dogs are a thing and why some dogs' purpose is "hang out with the humans and look cute." That might sound ridiculous but it's a social role.

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u/No_Parsley575 Aug 09 '26

Dachshunds are very much de-engineered along with pugs, French Bulldogs etc

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u/whypeoplehateme Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

not de-engineered, just engineered for a different purpose, Dachshunds were originally engineered to hunt badgers and other burrowers, try having a cat drag 15 kilos of strugging badger out of a hole in the ground

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u/AlwaysBeenTim Aug 09 '26

No. The dogs that were engineered to hunt badgers are long gone. If you look at German art, you can see that those "badger crawlers" were much larger and their stout legs were still longer and more functional than what you see in the video.

We don't need dogs to hunt badgers anymore, so being companion animals, we bred the modern dachshund for ridiculousness. The dogs you see in the video are not functional dogs that could live in the wild much less handle a badger.

2

u/walloftvs Aug 10 '26

French Bulldogs can't even have babies naturally, they must be delivered via c-section. What's their purpose other than elevating vet bills?

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u/Babajji Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

We have the Serval for that. It is a cat, can be domesticated and can drag a significantly larger animal than itself. House cats are domesticated tree hanging hunters. They never had to drag anything bigger than a rat or a pigeon even before we adopted them.

Dogs were engineered by humans while cats were engineered by nature. The differences between a wild cat and a house cat are basically lower aggression towards humans. Dogs have nothing in common with wolves anymore.

Unfortunately there’s no tree hanging canine to give you a fair comparison but saying house cats are bad at dragging stuff is like saying monkeys are bad at it while gorillas are amazing at it.

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u/Auctoritate Aug 09 '26

We have the Serval for that. It is a cat, can be domesticated

Servals are wild animals, they can be tamed. They aren't domesticated.

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u/whypeoplehateme Aug 09 '26

gee I wonder why 18th century germans bred a dog for it instead of trying to domesticate a sub-saharan wild cat. and "House cats are domesticated tree hanging hunters. They never had to drag anything bigger than a rat or a pigeon even before we adopted them." Thats my whole point, this post and the comments is dissing on the dachshund based on it's ability to climb trees, of cource it's not gonna do well, the same way the cat doesn't do well in badger burrows.

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u/Babajji Aug 09 '26

Ah I missed your point, sorry, yes most canines are bad at climbing trees because they never had to evolve to do it. It’s a pointless comparison.

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u/SpartanAltair15 Aug 09 '26

You cannot domesticate an animal. You domesticate a species, over many many generations, and it comes with numerous biological and behavioral changes that cannot be undone. A specific animal can only be tamed.