Dogs and cats have always been characterized by different formal and behavioral features, but a recent study indicated that the features of remarkable rapprochement between some of the strains of dogs and cats, especially in the structure of the skull and the shape of the face, were characterized by the appearance of natural factors, but rather the product of the pressures of artificial selection that humans practiced with a constant desire to develop features related to beauty and kindness.
The key to understanding this shift lies in some of the strains of cats and dogs in the tastes of humans themselves; The last decades have witnessed an increasing demand for animal breeds with “gentle” features, which simulate the features and shape of children’s face, such as wide eyes, the small nose centered between the eyes, and the round and flat face.
This type of biology is known as Newini, which is the survival of the attributes of pre -adulthood with the post -reaching organism, and these preferences prompted educators to focus on strains characterized by these characteristics through generations of artificial hybridization.
And when trying to understand this, we find that scientists have always indicated that the basic motives behind this tendency in humans are psychological and behavioral motives; As these features raise the feelings of care, connection and tenderness, and although this tendency was on the surface an aesthetic issue, it has become with time a compressive biological factor that led the development of these animals towards unfamiliar paths in nature.
Conditions for adaptation
In this study, the researchers analyzed three -dimensional samples of dog skulls and cats, and the results have shown that some of the strains of dogs and cats, such as the French Pulp Dog or the Bag Dog and the Persian cat known as Shirazi, became more similar to each other, compared to their wild predecessors or even other strains of the same type.
The study shed more light on the approximate development, which occurs when different types of living organisms are exposed to similar environmental pressure that leads to adapting a close path.
It is noteworthy that this similarity in the shape of the skull did not happen once, but rather repeated more than once within each type separately, which confirms that the response to pressure was similar despite the different evolutionary backgrounds.
A high biological price
The study shows that this rapprochement did not come without a price, as some anatomical changes, especially in cats such as Shirazi, exceeded the natural limits, as the widening eyes and the change of the position of the upper palate caused the reduction of the nose area, which led to a narrowness of the breathing course and chronic health problems.
Dogs, especially among the strains with flat faces, are increasingly and most strange, and most of the cats that were studied showed a complete lack of the nose bones, a precedent that was not monitored in nature.
In fact, the results that this study concluded raises broader questions about the impact of human intervention on the path of the adaptations of living organisms, as it seems that artificial selection is able to generate a huge formal diversity and achieve patterns of similarity between types that are not related to each other faster and more than we imagine.