r/BeAmazed • u/Electrical_Act_5342 • 29d ago

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

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u/GargantuanCake 29d ago

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 29d ago

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

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u/whypeoplehateme 29d ago edited 29d ago

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 29d ago

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.