<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=us-ascii" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18904"></HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=833560105-08062010>Or discussion last
week of housecats attacking dogs gave me an idea. </SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=833560105-08062010>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.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=833560105-08062010>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.
</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=833560105-08062010>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.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=833560105-08062010>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.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=833560105-08062010>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.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=833560105-08062010>The more I think
about it, the more I realize this is an obvious idea, so it must already exist
somewhere.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010>spike</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=833560105-08062010> </SPAN></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>