The history behind our pets’ most revolting habits
From pooing in strangers' gardens to barking incessantly, even the most precious pets can be annoying or embarrassing. Where did these behaviours come from?
In the UK, pets are now collectively almost a third as populous as humans, with an estimated 10.1 million dogs, 10.9 million cats and one million rabbits. Worldwide pet ownership is booming – in Japan, businesses have embraced the new trend by launching dog clothing lines and cat hotels, leading some commentators to suggest they're replacing children. In the US, there are almost 78 million dogs and 58 million cats.
But as more and more pets have bounded into our homes, some of these precious new family members' less desirable habits have become more apparent. There's the incessant barking and meowing that can keep whole neighbourhoods awake, digging up of plants, and jumping up with scratchy claws.
Where did companion animals – whose behaviour is often so carefully aligned with human preferences that dogs have evolved a dedicated muscle in their eyes to make them cuter, and cats have learned to interpret our facial movements – get those habits? And how can we learn to live with them?
To trace the origins of any particular behaviour, there are two important factors to consider – the wild animal your pet evolved from, and its history of living with humans.
The closest living relative of dogs (Canis familiaris) is the grey wolf (Canis lupus). Perhaps the wolves merely followed humans around, snapping up discarded scraps of food as they moved from camp to camp – or they may have hunted in packs alongside humans, chasing down large prey and providing an advantage that they allowed us to out-compete our relatives, the Neanderthals. Another possibility is that it all began with ancient humans keeping wolf pups as pets. Eventually the relationship deepened and the wolves underwent a physical transformation – their ears became floppy, their tails curved, and their coats became mottled. They also adapted their behaviours to suit their new collaborators.
Take the excitable greetings of many dogs, who jump up and try to lick your face. "They would like to give a 'kiss' – or at least this is how people describe it," says Zsofia Viranyi, an expert in comparative cognition at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. This trait – often ranked high among dogs' most annoying habits – is a quintessential wolf behaviour. As pups, wolves jump up and lick inside other pack members' mouths after they have returned from a hunt, as a way of begging for food. The adult wolves will promptly vomit up a half-digested meal for them to eat.
On the other hand, some habits that are perfectly normal in the wild ancestors of our pets have been greatly exaggerated.
Like dogs, cats have also been living with humans for millennia. They're descended from North African/ South- west Asian wildcats (Felis silvestris lybica) – solitary, territorial animals that feed on small rodents. Genetic and archaeological evidence suggests they may have originally encountered humans in the famous Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East at least 6,500 years ago, where the first farming communities sprung up.
Initially, the cats hung around for the banquet of rodents that thrived around human settlements, but eventually they began to interact with people. They dispersed from their homeland along human trade routes.
Which brings us to a trait that some cat owners might consider an inherent part of their appeal: the meow. Intriguingly, wildcats do meow – but only at their mothers when they are kittens. As adults, they don't generally make this noise. Domestic pusses keep their meow throughout their lives, but not for the benefit of communicating with other cats – just their human companions.
It's a similar story for the dog's bark. Domestic dogs use it as a universal language to convey a broad spectrum of remarks, from the original meanings to "hello", an invitation to play, excitement at an impending snack or walk, or loneliness. Despite the adaptive meowing of modern pusses, some experts only view cats as "semidomesticated", since they retain many of their wild behaviours.
Domestic cats haven't adapted to eat human scraps in the same way dogs have – they can't taste carbohydrates – so retaining their hunting skills may have been a sensible strategy for supplementing their nutritional intake. Oddly, bringing back a catch and depositing it at your feet is may also be a wildcat behaviour. In the wild, mothers naturally bring half-dead animals back to their nest, for their babies to practise hunting on. Some experts think that the "gift"-giving of domestic cats is an extension of this trait – they're either instinctively bringing their catches back to where they live, or they think of you as a particularly inept kitten that needs to learn how to hunt.
For more minor annoyances, understanding where our pets' habits come from might help us to reframe them as what they are – fascinating ghosts from the past, rather than personality flaws to be eradicated.