Nik Simpson wrote:

But they weren't domesticated to eat the human food scraps, they earned
their keep killing and eating rodents and the like. Early selection by
humans would favor the good rat catchers over the ones that spend all
their time mooching food of da hoomans :-) Although judging by my lot,
some of the moochers made it through :-)

I agree with you that that's how it started. But at some point, people
took in cats as pets, too, and I think that was fairly early on in the
process. Didn't early Egyptians have cats as pets? Other cultures did,
too. I'm sure cats continued to catch their food, but couldn't they also
have give the cats their leftovers?

Cats can reproduce a couple of times a year, correct? And it only takes
6-9 months for a kitten to grow up to reproductive age. So 9,000 years
could be an evolutionarily significant period of time for the cat's
biological systems to change and adapt to the available food supply.

I suppose that if cats generally subsisted on human-food scraps AND
whatever they could catch, then they wouldn't have needed to adapt to
a diet consisting only of scraps. So the scraps alone wouldn't be enough
for them.

Joyce