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Meow (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Did they model their meows, or did they have a trait that happened to work in a new environment and then pass it on?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago (2 children)

From my understanding, wild cats only meow when little and domesticated cats keep this juvenile trait into adulthood

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yes, but the question is if they model their meows to sound like human infants. We know they changed their behavior to meow when wanting attention from us. But I'd be willing to bet they didn't model their meows to sound like that. They just happen to sound like that because they're small animals with high pitch voices.

[–] Revan343 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"They modelled their meows to sound like human infants" implies active intent, but (I'm sure you know) that's not how evolution actually works. If the theory is correct, their meows would naturally evolve to sound more like babies because those are the cats that we would be more likely to take care of, whereas cats with meows that sounded less like our babies would be less likely to be taken care of, and thus less likely to reproduce.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

My only issue with this statement is that it implies there were cats that sounded different from how domesticated cats sound now. I'm not really conviced of that. To my understanding they have a high pitch voice because they're small. For instance you can find videos online where they record a tiger "meowing" then they pitch it up to the register of a house cat. The resulting meow sounds nearly indistinguishable (other than the digital artifacts Inherent to doing such a thing) from a regular house cat's meow. Now tigers obviously didn't adapt to meowing like infants so my conclusion is that cats just sound like that and natural (human?) Selection had very little if anything to do with it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

Or: people who didn't respond to these meows didn't keep their cats and rats ate all their grain so people more responsive to the meows reproduced more...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

There's a good chance that it's just a mammalian trait that predates modern humans or house cats. Pretty much all mammals require some extra protection and care when they are young and vulnerable, so it being common among other mammals isn't exactly surprising.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

To my knowledge that's a lot of how domestication winds up being.

What I found interesting was a study when they tried to domesticate silver foxes for the fur industry (because basically they didn't take to being raised in fur farms well). So basically they were selectively bread for not being aggressive to humans.

Which worked, but the drawbacks were effectively... all of their childlike traits remained. IE their ears stayed floppy, and they stopped growing the silver coat that was the whole reason the fur industry wanted them.

Basically I think it could be said that effectively... most domestication traits are more or less, keeping childlike mentality for life in animals.