[dboreham]

Hmm. Not one single bit of information about "natural dog/cat life" is encoded into a shelter kitten's brain. All the data used to train their brain came from humans and their human environment. Cats even learn to talk human (as best as their vocal apparatus and GPU allows). Whether they're better off or worse off I don't know, but any given cat only knows it's historical environment. They're not "taken" from some other place. That happened tens of thousands of years ago and no brain content from that time has been propagated to present day cats.

Fwiw my cats have friends that are deer, by virtue of there being deer in their environment, and their curiosity. And deer are quite curious too. Actually we have magpies that are friends with deer too. If cats were somehow pre-wired to only want to associate with cats, why are they associating with deer?

[block_dagger]

Concerning cats, I'm specifically talking about imprisonment and mutilation. Cats are social roaming animals and many are kept staring out windows of small apartments and run for the door every time it's opened hoping for escape. Mutilation occurs regularly to keep them from procreating. All of this is socially accepted by humans. If a cat is running around free and being fed and sheltered by humans, no problem, but obviously this can lead to issues with feral populations that don't mix well with civic engineered spaces.