domestication
.png)
Explanation
The Joke
The comic contrasts the domestication of dogs with the domestication of cats. In the top panel, labeled "The Domestication of the Dog," an ancient human warmly invites a wolf out of the forest, saying "Come, noble wolf. We will work as one, the best of friends for all time." This depicts the traditional narrative of dogs being intentionally domesticated through a mutual, cooperative partnership between humans and wolves.
In the bottom panel, labeled "The Domestication of the Cat," the scene is very different. A human notices a cat eating vermin from his grain silo and shouts "Whoa! Hey, are you eating all the vermin from my grain silo?!" The cat dismissively replies "That's none of your goddamn business." This reflects the actual scientific understanding that cats essentially domesticated themselves -- they were attracted to human agricultural settlements because of the rodent populations that grain storage created, and they never really submitted to human authority in the way dogs did.
The Humor
The comedy comes from the stark contrast between the two domestication stories. Dogs are portrayed as the result of a grand, intentional partnership -- a noble alliance between species. Cats, on the other hand, just showed up uninvited, started doing whatever they wanted, and could not care less about the human's opinion on the matter. The cat's surly "That's none of your goddamn business" perfectly captures the stereotypical cat personality: useful, but entirely on its own terms. The joke resonates because every cat owner recognizes this dynamic -- cats provide companionship and pest control, but they maintain an air of complete indifference to human desires.
References
The comic draws on research in animal domestication. Dogs are believed to have been domesticated from wolves roughly 15,000-40,000 years ago through active human selection. Cats, by contrast, are thought to have "self-domesticated" around 10,000 years ago in the Near East's Fertile Crescent, drawn to early agricultural communities by the mice and rats that fed on stored grain. A 2017 study in Nature Ecology & Evolution confirmed that cats spread along human trade routes largely on their own terms, with minimal selective breeding by humans until relatively recently.