Are cats and dogs our prisoners

On average: - Cats can come and go as they please, excluding large cities where it would be cruel to let cats out in the traffic. Yet a cat will opt to stay in any home unless treatment is extremely bad and provided a better home with another human is not available. Fact is the cat will prefer
another home with humans rather than without us.

This relationship started thousands of years ago. At first the cats had a loose relationship making use of the shelter and hunting mice. The humans saw the advantage of the cats removing vermin and started to encourage the cats to stay. Except in that dim time in the history when people spread the lie that cats were witches and had them killed. The result was an explosion in the rat population and the plague followed killing about 25% of the European population. Looking at that 300 year long episode of history baffles me. It was so absolutely idiotic to think that even the church joined in condemning the cats and had them killed. The plague came repeatedly as well as poisoning by rat droppings, not to mention food loss. That was dark ages for sure.

Different animals living together where both benefit is nothing new in nature. We did not tresspass against nature by adopting the cat in any way. There are many examples of other animals living together, but I am not going to list them. From my own experience I had the luck to see a gobby (fish) and a pistol shrimp living together in a tide pool near Durban. The claws of this shrimp species are formed so that it can give a loud click easy to hear above water. If I did not know about it I would not have believed the loud snapping sound came from that little shrimp underwater. It would certainly frighten enemies and I read it will also stun or confuse prey long enough for the shrimp to catch it. I watched these two creatures for a few days - they are roughly the same size.. They made a hole under a stone and took turns to clean it with one of them always on watch at the entrance. The loose sand and waves gave them no rest. It was odd to see creatures that differ so much working as a team. The gobby on the photo above was not the one I saw not even the same species, it is just to show a gobby. We took the photo and let the little guy go again.

Many animals and birds are joining our cities much in the same way that cat and dog did thousands of years ago. It will be interesting to see how the relationships develope after 2-3 thousand years from now. -- If the human race still exist and hoping that people who twist information and the meaning of "animal rights" do not create another dim time in history.