I wouldn’t say that cats are a great example even at the basics (dogs would be a much better example). For example, neutering male cats was for the most part not about population control (only a recent concern), but about making sure they don’t piss everywhere on your stuff—not just pissing on it, mind you, but ultra-high nitrogen piss that reeks to high heaven and never goes away. (We have a spot in the garage I don’t think our cat has peed on in something like 5 years; you can still smell it.) Cats can’t easily be toilet-trained to hold it and go outside like a dog can, and so even if they aren’t actively spraying it on every wall, you still have to do with Satan’s feces. They aren’t omnivorous like dogs but obligate carnivores because they lost some amino acid synthesis (not for any good reason, just because of hypercarnivory), so their food is unnecessarily expensive. They go off their food due to hypersensitive food poisoning biases rather than being demonic little pigs like dogs. They have narrow plasticity windows as kittens and no human-centric adaptations. They overuse claws, hence declawing (this was always highly unusual for dogs AFAIK). Their bites are even worse, because they resort to biting in lieu of more effective communication strategies far more than dogs do while their dirty needle teeth make them far more lethal (as I mention there, incidents like my grandmother being hospitalized by a nip are not unusual). They are allergenic despite the fact that they can easily be made much more hypoallergenic (it’s easy to breed or CRISPR them the remove the major offender). They are so terrified of vets that many owners resort to drugging them. (I use gabapentine.) While at the vet (or in a bath tub when they need bathing because of matting or parasites etc), they are a mortal threat to everyone around them. The default reaction of a cat to medical issues is to hide it, so often a cat owner only realizes there is a problem when the cat is on the brink of death. (My first cat died the night we took her to the vet after I became very alarmed she hadn’t been eating or drinking much for around a week, simply hiding away laying calmly in place, which everyone else didn’t find alarming because she didn’t look like she was suffering or unhappy in any way, like a dog would’ve; my second cat was within days of kidney failure due to cystitis when I finally saw him pass some bloody urine and, now more familiar with cat health patterns & compression of morbidity, knew that it was an emergency.) ‘Cat cooperation’ is almost a contradiction in terms and proverbially non-existent: not only do they not cooperate or get along with each other, they don’t do useful things like understand humans pointing at something (eg. treats).
No, there’s a lot of ways in which cats are not good at cooperation across a large intelligence gap, and are in fact quite awful at it, not far from their wildcat ancestors, and nor have they visibly improved over the eons (which is why Bradshaw can speculate about all cat domestication taking place in very ancient Egypt—because we sure don’t see any happening in better recorded times). As much as I love cats, they come with a lot of obvious unnecessary drawbacks and a striking absence of adaptation.
There are a lot of reasons that cats have only really taken off recently as pets on par with dogs, rather than being working animals or mutualisms on the edge of society or unusual: neutering makes male cats at all bearable; the recent invention of cat litter (post-WWII!) is a workaround for the toiletry problem; economic growth and industrial farming makes the protein-heavy diet feasible; and urbanization favors small animals and sedentary behaviors, penalizing dogs by making them both harder to keep and much less useful as working animals or security.
I wouldn’t say that cats are a great example even at the basics (dogs would be a much better example). For example, neutering male cats was for the most part not about population control (only a recent concern), but about making sure they don’t piss everywhere on your stuff—not just pissing on it, mind you, but ultra-high nitrogen piss that reeks to high heaven and never goes away. (We have a spot in the garage I don’t think our cat has peed on in something like 5 years; you can still smell it.) Cats can’t easily be toilet-trained to hold it and go outside like a dog can, and so even if they aren’t actively spraying it on every wall, you still have to do with Satan’s feces. They aren’t omnivorous like dogs but obligate carnivores because they lost some amino acid synthesis (not for any good reason, just because of hypercarnivory), so their food is unnecessarily expensive. They go off their food due to hypersensitive food poisoning biases rather than being demonic little pigs like dogs. They have narrow plasticity windows as kittens and no human-centric adaptations. They overuse claws, hence declawing (this was always highly unusual for dogs AFAIK). Their bites are even worse, because they resort to biting in lieu of more effective communication strategies far more than dogs do while their dirty needle teeth make them far more lethal (as I mention there, incidents like my grandmother being hospitalized by a nip are not unusual). They are allergenic despite the fact that they can easily be made much more hypoallergenic (it’s easy to breed or CRISPR them the remove the major offender). They are so terrified of vets that many owners resort to drugging them. (I use gabapentine.) While at the vet (or in a bath tub when they need bathing because of matting or parasites etc), they are a mortal threat to everyone around them. The default reaction of a cat to medical issues is to hide it, so often a cat owner only realizes there is a problem when the cat is on the brink of death. (My first cat died the night we took her to the vet after I became very alarmed she hadn’t been eating or drinking much for around a week, simply hiding away laying calmly in place, which everyone else didn’t find alarming because she didn’t look like she was suffering or unhappy in any way, like a dog would’ve; my second cat was within days of kidney failure due to cystitis when I finally saw him pass some bloody urine and, now more familiar with cat health patterns & compression of morbidity, knew that it was an emergency.) ‘Cat cooperation’ is almost a contradiction in terms and proverbially non-existent: not only do they not cooperate or get along with each other, they don’t do useful things like understand humans pointing at something (eg. treats).
No, there’s a lot of ways in which cats are not good at cooperation across a large intelligence gap, and are in fact quite awful at it, not far from their wildcat ancestors, and nor have they visibly improved over the eons (which is why Bradshaw can speculate about all cat domestication taking place in very ancient Egypt—because we sure don’t see any happening in better recorded times). As much as I love cats, they come with a lot of obvious unnecessary drawbacks and a striking absence of adaptation.
There are a lot of reasons that cats have only really taken off recently as pets on par with dogs, rather than being working animals or mutualisms on the edge of society or unusual: neutering makes male cats at all bearable; the recent invention of cat litter (post-WWII!) is a workaround for the toiletry problem; economic growth and industrial farming makes the protein-heavy diet feasible; and urbanization favors small animals and sedentary behaviors, penalizing dogs by making them both harder to keep and much less useful as working animals or security.