Cats and Dogs?

When I was a kid, I would usually lump bears in with dogs, and the big cats in with house cats...to me, bears seemed like large dogs, and cats were similar throughout the size spectrum. This turns out to be rather accurate from the scientific lookout. I did learn some other things, like where mongooses, weasels, and badgers all fit.

Alphabetically, I guess I'll start with the caniforms, the canines. The caniforms differ from the feliformia (cats) in that they have more teeth and un-retractable claws, among other differences in hearing and jaw shape.

The canines are broken up into seven families. I'll dispense with the latin and use common names. Dogs, foxes, and wolves make up one family. Bears make up a second. Skunks a third. Raccoons occupy a fourth. A fifth is made up of otters, weasels, wolverines and badgers. A sixth is a large one comprised of the seals, sea-lions and walruses. The seventh is rather small, and consists of the red-panda, not related to pandas otherwise, resembles a fox, lives in the Himalayas and other parts of South-East Asia, and is sometimes called a fire-fox. Pandas themselves are listed in the bear family.

Canines tend to be opportunistic hunters, or pack hunters, or scavengers, or omnivores, while felines tend to be ambush hunters, less social (lions not-withstanding), and generally mostly carnivorous, obtaining most of their nutrition from freshly killed meat (house-cats not-withstanding). 

The felines are broken up into six families. The common house cat is in the same family as the large cats; lions, tigers, jaguars, cheetahs, ocelots, etc (although cheetahs differ substantially from their other taxonomic relatives). A second family consists of hyenas and aardwolves. A third is made up of mongooses and meerkats. A fourth consists of civets, binturongs, genets and linsangs. This family is considered relatively close to the earliest form of carnivorous hunter that first broke away from the cat/dog common ancestor. A fifth feline family consists of the Malagasy carnivores. Madagascar, being an island, apparently had some early feliforms living there when it broke away from continental Africa, and all mammalian predators are descended from the early feline ancestor. The sixth family consists of one single specie, the palm civet, which is different enough to have it's own family.

Dogs have been domesticated for possibly 15,000 years, while cats have been domesticated for possibly 10,000 years.

Awesome. I like them both.