Ancestral humans shared territory with leopards, and children were vulnerable (1). Big cats are still dangerous.
Having a leopard stare at you, even through a fence, does raise the heart rate. But I don't know why we regard big cats so relatively favourably, when an evolved innate repulsion, such as to spiders or snakes, would make as much sense.
> Ancestral humans shared territory with leopards, and children were vulnerable
For a long time I've been interested in the fact that children are afraid that, if they are left alone, they will be eaten by monsters.
In the ancestral environment, this is absolutely true. But the belief is obviously innate and not learned. What's interesting is that the innate belief is correct in the details, as opposed to being something that is not necessarily true but nevertheless produces the correct behavior.
Cats are just aesthetically well put together animals. We probably also like the smaller ones due to 5000 years of them predating upon vermin that like to hang around our encampments.
> Cats are just aesthetically well put together animals
"They have a mat of messy protein extrusions in place of an exoskeleton, their eyes have no facets, and their thorax is completely indistinct from their abdomen!"
I don't agree with that kind of aesthetic relativism. It undermines both the nature of the mind as something that can objectively know reality (which undermines the relativistic claim at the same time), and the richness of reality itself. Materialism is bunk, and something that corrupts and replaced reality with some crude reductive imaginary thing.
Beauty is objective. Taste is subjective. Hence why we can say that someone has poor taste, i.e., the subjective fails to align with the objective.
I can admire the beauty of an insect as an insect without me being an insect. Similarly, if an insect were intelligent, possessed with an intellect, it could judge the feline as a beautiful creature as a feline.
"As X" is important, because it is a matter of how well the specimen realizes the telos of its species. Hence, why defect is ugly. You wouldn't say pi is an ugly integer. You wouldn't say a hammer is a crappy saw. You wouldn't say a fish is a bad mountain hiker, except as a shorthand for "fish do not mountain hike, are not anatomically + physiologically ordered toward hiking".
And of course there degrees of good, and therefore, beauty, based on how much more you resemble the Highest Good and therefore the Most Beautiful, Goodness and Beauty as such.
Cats have large, forward-facing eyes, and a relatively short snout and jaws (especially smaller cats like the domestic cats, caracals, etc). This makes them look less like a typical predator (long jaws, like wolf's) and less like a typical grazing animal (side-looking eyes, long jaws, like a horse or camel). They look close enough to humans to look cute, possibly triggering some if the low-level reactions which human babies trigger.
Arthropods and even snakes are morphologically too distant for that. Nevertheless, people usually find large-eyed geckos more cute than armor-eyed chameleons or tiny-eyed crocodiles.
5000 years isn't that long in evolutionary biology timescales. But culturally we do kinda like the usefulness of the smaller cats.
I would say that the cute cats are domesticated species, like many animals. So they wouldn't exist without humans, and it's in their benefit to behave to survive.
Interestingly enough, the genomes of wild forest cats and domestic cats have diverged FAR less than other domesticated animals such as dogs/sheep/etc. We domesticated other animals, but up until the 18th century or so I'd say it's more accurate to describe what we've done with cats as "co-evolution"
Cats are more "companion" rather than "domesticated" and (until recently) cats weren't bred for specific traits (and those now tend to be aesthetic choices rather than "practical" choices).
Compare this with dogs that are more of a "working animal." We've bread dogs to fill specific roles because they were larger to work with. If humanity had tried to find companionship in the mountain lion instead of Felis lybica (the wild cat).
I suspect part of the lack of range comes also from that the cats of size that don't eat us are not ones that can be crossbred with cats in the wild to introduce new useful genes. Trying to cross a domestic cat a wild cat doesn't produce a new cat that is useful in a new role ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felid_hybrids#Confirmed_domest... ). Compare this with domestic dogs and the various wild dog species.
> The remarkable responsiveness of dog morphology to selection is a testament to the mutability of mammals. The genetic sources of this morphological variation are largely unknown, but some portion is due to tandem repeat length variation in genes involved in development. Previous analysis of tandem repeats in coding regions of developmental genes revealed fewer interruptions in repeat sequences in dogs than in the orthologous repeats in humans, as well as higher levels of polymorphism, but the fragmentary nature of the available dog genome sequence thwarted attempts to distinguish between locus-specific and genome-wide origins of this disparity. Using whole-genome analyses of the human and recently completed dog genomes, we show that dogs possess a genome-wide increase in the basal germ-line slippage mutation rate. Building on the approach that gave rise to the initial observation in dogs, we sequenced 55 coding repeat regions in 42 species representing 10 major carnivore clades and found that a genome-wide elevated slippage mutation rate is a derived character shared by diverse wild canids, distinguishing them from other Carnivora. A similarly heightened slippage profile was also detected in rodents, another taxon exhibiting high diversity and rapid evolvability. The correlation of enhanced slippage rates with major evolutionary radiations suggests that the possession of a "slippery" genome may bestow on some taxa greater potential for rapid evolutionary change.
I've read, and like, a theory that their unpredictable movement is a big driver in the fear of spiders and snakes. I just found this with a quick search, for some evidence (it's not what I read originally, years ago): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20438087231151...
Of course, I'm not an expert in anything so this could be bunk.
Spider movement is just creepy to me, even when I know where it's going. Something about the way its legs move just gives me the shivers. Even Spider-Man used to give me the creeps when I was a young child, particularly the non-speaking variant seen on The Electric Company.
I think there's just something viscerally, instinctually unsettling about how some arthropods move, which gives rise to arthropod-like monsters in fiction (xenomorphs, Bugs in Starship Troopers, Zerg, etc.). Spiders, the poor beasts, get the worst of our fear because they don't move their legs via muscles like we vertebrates, or even insects, do; their body pumps hemolymph into the legs, forcing them to straighten. This hydraulic-pressure system of movement is just different enough to our visual system to be really weird.
I've grown quite fond of spiders. I don't have the same aversion I used to when I was younger. There are so many hobo spiders on the exterior of my house, but I leave them be unless they're in my way, because they've noticeably reduced the populations of every other nuisance bug. As long as they keep to themselves and don't invade my space, I'll let them chill. And I just relocate them if they wander in. Killing them is just sad.
Wolf spiders are welcome in my basement though. They are smart enough and have good enough eyesight that the likelihood of getting bit by one is super low. They hunt down all the pests in your home.
What makes them extremely cool is that they're kinda like nature's hydraulic robots.
I'm with you. I'm viscerally still creeped out by spiders, but I leave them alone and let them do spider-things (which, as you say, generally involves hunting down insects that I do not want around). The same with house centipedes, which my wife wants to kill on sight but I urge her not to.
Exactly: I appreciate spiders, because they remove flies etc. I'll go out of my way to let web spiders be. I'll safely move a hunting spider out of the house. But I do not want to touch them or pet them.
Humans have even less aversion towards marine arthropods. A lot of people would find eating beetles gross, but eat gladly shrimp, and find a lobster a delicacy.
Some people lost fear from other predators: aggressive dogs. They even force family members to live in dangerous situation, where they get attacked and injured regularly.
Mental illness or brain parasite is the only possible explanation for dog owners behavior.
This is definitely true, at least in the US, and it's quite different from historical norms too. Ages ago, aggressive dogs were put down quickly (or used as guard dogs, with appropriate restraints). People also didn't normally keep large dogs inside, sleep in beds with them, etc. But now it's common for some odd reason for people to want to keep aggressive dogs around their young children, and then act shocked when something terrible happens.
Even when a dog is not aggressive, unexplainable things can happen.
Last year, there was news in The Netherlands about a case where grandparents were babysitting. Their normally docile German shepherd killed the baby within seconds.
>The dog had bitten another dog two years earlier and a cat seven years before the incident with the baby, but an expert stated that aggressive behavior towards animals is no reason to assume that it is also aimed at people.
Really? These "experts" are morons. German Shepherds are well-known for their use as police and military dogs because of their size, strength, and aggressiveness. Sure, they can be trained better than some other known-to-be-vicious dogs, but they're still dangerous. Putting one in a room with an infant is pure stupidity. Even worse, this particular dog had already attacked other animals in the past. At the very best, you might be able to claim that a dog that bit a cat years ago isn't necessarily unsafe around full-grown adult humans, but a German Shepherd chomping on a person isn't an immediate death sentence, but with an infant it really is.
This article also sucks because it doesn't even tell us what ultimately happened to the dog.
"Attacks in India are still relatively common, and in some regions of the country leopards kill more humans than all other large carnivores combined.[9][10] "
A fascinating video of a leopard attacking baboons[1]. The big cat achieves a scratch on one baboon and then runs away from the troop. Enough to infect and then later pick off an errant victim? To my eye, the baboons are sad at the expectation that they will soon lose a friend.
In primates, there's some non-fear of cats too. For humans and domestic felines, this isn't much of an issue. For chimpanzees who share territory with leopards, this is more of an issue. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/science/a-parasite-leopar... (and the paper - Morbid attraction to leopard urine in Toxoplasma-infected chimpanzees https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221... )