[ExI] idea regarding cats

[John Grigg]

Spike,

I really like your idea.  I remember reading about a new and very
expensive breed that resembles lions (they even have manes).  And as
you might hope, they are very social creatures (especially with
humans).

Good luck with the feline breeding program.  I can imagine you as the
founder of a  modern-day Bene Gesserit with the goal of creating a
super kitty.  "How can Fluffy singlehandedly fight off packs of big
dogs, purr like an Italian sports car, rescue drowning children from
swimming pools, and be almost the size of a German Shepherd"?

"How can this be?"  "For he is the cat Kwisatz Haderach!!!"

John  : )


On 6/7/10, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> Or discussion last week of housecats attacking dogs gave me an idea.
>
> Modern domestic dogs have been bred from wolves for all manner of different
> and useful behaviors, such as pulling sleds, guarding the junkyard, hunting,
> herding sheep and so on.  But cats, not so much.  The different breeds of
> cats behave pretty much the same; seldom do you see one that actually does
> anything.  Cats are useless beasts, ja?  So we now have a tool that the old
> timers didn't have, which could speed up the breeding of certain cat
> behaviors perhaps a hundredfold.
>
> When I was in college, my sweetheart and I were at a county park when a
> starving abandoned kitten came running up, attacking us wildly.  It was
> crazed with hunger, leaping on any living thing regardless of its size,
> attempting to bite out a chunk of meat.  Not wanting a cat but not wishing
> to part with any actual flesh, we took the starving beast home, fed him, cut
> the innumerable burrs out of his fur, generally brought him back from the
> brink.  That evening I put the cat outside, where I assumed all cats
> belonged, but someone let him back in.  I woke up in the night with a
> strange feeling: the cat had crawled underneath my neck, stretched out
> longways.  He wanted to sleep with me.
>
> I don't know if the beast felt grateful for having been saved from
> starvation, or what was the deal, but that was the most human-loving cat you
> ever saw.  If I let him, he would climb up on my shoulders while I was
> studying and drape himself across the back of my neck like a fur wrap, all
> four feet forward, and nap that way.  It was quite the distraction having
> this napping beast purring right in my ear, but I occasionally allowed it.
> He always wanted to be right where all the people were.
>
> So here's the idea: if we wanted to breed cats for a certain behavior, the
> internet would be a perfect tool.  We could advertise or form a cat breeding
> club, to breed for certain traits in cats, such as the biggest, the meanest,
> the nicest, the best mouser, the most easily trained to use a toilet (I have
> a friend who managed to train his cat to do that), the most likely to attack
> a dog to protect his own dog, the one who loves people the most, or does
> some oddball behavior like sleep hanging over one's shoulders, etc.
>
> It took humans thousands of years to create certain behaviors in dog breeds,
> but there were so many limitations.  If we had an internet group, it
> essentially forms a worldwide gene pool from which we could single out some
> wacky trait or other, then find a pair, both of which like to drape across
> ones shoulders for instance, then use the beast equivalent of follistim to
> make a hundred embryos from those two.  We could breed cats that come when
> they are called.  We could breed cats that act more like dogs.  We could
> perhaps create cat breeds which don't just fawn on their owners when they
> are hungry, but do so all the time like my college cat.  We might be able to
> do this in a single human lifetime, or perhaps two.
>
> The more I think about it, the more I realize this is an obvious idea, so it
> must already exist somewhere.
>
> spike
>
>
>