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Domestication

Author: Youngjin Kang

Date: 2022.11

Human beings are considered the masters of livestock engineering, due to the observation that we have managed to raise countless numbers of chickens, pigs, and cows to our advantage. But when it comes to practical considerations, we cannot deny the fact that cats may have mastered the art of animal domestication in a more quintessential way.

Let us just consider all the benefits which house cats receive on a daily basis for granted, without having to undertake any type of work whatsoever. When a human wants to use chickens, pigs, and cows to one's advantage, he/she must take care of them by providing shelters, foods, medication, and constant cleanups to prevent contamination.

Cats, on the other hand, have domesticated humans in a completely automated way. Cats do not feed humans or provide shelters for them, yet humans constantly serve cats like loyal servants. From a cat's point of view, its human caregiver is a fully automated livestock - a functional equivalent of an intelligent cow which manages to take care of both the cowshed and the owner's house, as well as regularly squirting milk out of its breast, pouring it into a nice cup of tea, and handing it over to the owner every morning.

And cats didn't even have to come up with all sorts of fancy technologies to make this happen. The only price they have to pay for keeping their subscription to the army of self-replicating and self-sustaining ape servants is to look cute and occasionally do some cute things. This is a level of efficiency which mankind couldn't dare to dream of achieving even with the aid of advanced AI, machine learning, big data, and sophisticated industrial pipelines.