Question: Were house hold dogs and cats ever wild and if yes then how did man tame them?

Claire Vinten answered on 19 Mar 2014:

Hi,

Nice question!

Yes, both dogs and cats both started off wild. It’s not that hard to imagine them as wild if you think about wolves and lions!

Dogs were the first animal that humans kept as pets. Dogs come from wild wolves, that got friendly with humans around 30,000 years ago! We think that the wolves came to the humans for food, and the humans kept them and bred them until they were tame. The strange thing is that dogs don’t look or act very much like wolves any more… we think this is because humans bred them to be tame, and other feature of dogs (for example floppy ears) were bred into them by accident at the same time.

It is harder to tell where cats were domesticated from, but we think probably from wild cats that live in Europe or Africa. Cats were harder to tame than dogs, as they are very independent – but it is likely the humans gave wild cats food and shelter in return for the cats catching mice and other pests. This seemed like a good deal to the cats, so they stuck around!

It did take thousands of years for dogs and cats to become pets like they are today, the process would have been slow.

Hope this answers your question 🙂