The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Dogs and Cats and cats are both domesticated four-legged fur-bearing mammals.

And beyond that, they don't really have a whole lot in common.

One of the things that they don't have in common

is how they wound up in the lives of humans.

Cats establish their relationship with humans at a totally different point in history and for totally different reasons.

Learn more about the domestication of cats and how these wild animals wound up as pets on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. To understand domesticated cats you first have to understand the animal that they came from the

wild cat. Wildcats are cats that look very similar to some domesticated cats.

They are roughly the same size and if you saw a wild cat out in the wild

you might assume that it was just a domesticated cat that was on the loose.

Taxonomically, cats are members of the family Philidae.

Philidae has three genera. The first genus is Pantera which consists of all

the large cats that can roar. These include lions, tigers, leopards, snow leopards, clouded leopards,

and jaguars.

The second genus is A.Cionics, which consists of only Cheetas.

And the third and final genus is Phyllis, which consists of all smaller cats including wildcats.

Wildcats consists of two species,

the African wildcat and the European wildcat.

Both cats look similar to each other

and there are multiple subspecies of a wild cat which are located all over Africa, the Middle East, parts of Iran, India, Central Asia, China and Europe.

Some taxonomists do consider the various subspecies to be different species, but it's hard to create a hard division because where wildcat subspecies interact, they tend to breed with each other.

Wildcats, as you can probably guess, are silent hunters that prey on small animals such as rodents and birds.

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