(WYTV) — More than 500 million domestic house cats wander around our homes today. They have descended from wildcats, but through symbiosis, we get along. We kind of need them and they kind of need us.
Ancient Egyptians would shave off their eyebrows when their cats died. The relationship between cats and humans goes back a very long way beginning with that single subspecies of wildcat.
Archaeologists tell us that cats probably domesticated themselves more than ten thousand years ago when they found they could grab a tasty meal hanging around our storerooms and farms looking for rats and mice. They got rid of the rodents for us, saving crops from being eaten and contaminated.
More cats, more crops for humans.
We and the cats figured this out pretty quickly, and before you knew it, we had the modern house cat.
Much like birds, cats make many different noises. Cats can make up to 100 sounds, dogs only 10.
