Research overview: comparing cat and dog domestication

Dogs and cats represent contrasting domestication stories, and comparing them clarifies what domestication means. This overview surveys the differences: dogs descend from wolves through a long, intense relationship that reshaped their behaviour and morphology, while cats entered a loose commensal partnership that left them little changed and still interfertile with wildcats. It examines divergent social systems, with dogs adapted to cooperative group living and cats retaining flexible solitary tendencies, and how these shape communication, trainability and bonding with humans. The survey also compares the genetic signatures of tameness in each species and discusses why cats are often called semi-domesticated, using the comparison to highlight that domestication is a spectrum rather than a binary state.