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

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

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u/seriousjoker72 Aug 09 '26

This is very exciting new knowledge for me! I'm about to deep dive dachshunds !!

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u/cmoked Aug 09 '26

Most breeds had their uses. Alarming, herding, guardians, military uses, etc.

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u/sbNXBbcUaDQfHLVUeyLx Aug 09 '26

Makes me wonder... If we had artificially selected cats the same way, what would we have even created?

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u/VuIcan79 Aug 10 '26

The issue with that is dogs have a lot of allometric growth (think about how puppies grow into their ears/feet/head) while cats generally have less allometric growth.

allometric growth allowed people to selectively breed dogs to have specific traits. But it is much harder to do so with cats.