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Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, it may not be a final decision.But don’t take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way — about 12,000 years, actually.
Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published today in the journal Science.
The findings, drawn from an analysis of nearly 1,000 cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today’s tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship.
They found what they were seeking in the form of rodents feeding on stored grain. They stayed for 12 millennia, although not without wandering off now and again to consort with their wild cousins.
The story is quite different from that of other domesticated animals: cattle, sheep, goats, horses — and dogs, cats’ main rivals for human affection. It may even provide insight on the behavior of the animal that, if not man’s best friend, is certainly his most inscrutable.
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Some good reading here.
A question in a trivia book lead me into researching this article. The question was: “Which president’s life was saved due to a speech he had prepared?” A little blurb on the card explained that Teddy Roosevelt was about to give a speech when an assailant ran forward and fired a shot. Due to the thickness of the manuscript of the speech, it acted as a deterent and slowed the bullet down enough so that it only pierced him — a sort of bullet-proof vest if you will. A quick trip to the library and I was able to find on microfilm a copy of the October 15, 1912 edition of the Detroit Free Press. Right there on the front page was the news all about it. Printed here are transcripts of the text of the news accounts.
Link (again)
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