Plausibility check: Domesticated American Cats?

Which is why there is a prevailing theory that the domestication of cats was a deliberate action on their behalf.



So, your domestic jaguars are trained to get a taste for human flesh, but not our human flesh? I've said it a dozen times already; it doesn't work that way. Before anyone else mentions wolves as a counter-argument, wolves have a social hierarchy which humans can supplant. Wolves do not attack pack-members and especially not pack-leaders. Jaguars have no such social structure, are solitary, and even in cases where they've been raised from birth it's dangerous to give them a taste of raw meat because they don't have the same dog-mentality to "not bite the hand that feeds them" (the same is true for domestic cats).

Jaguar happens to be hungry - it will eat the nearest source of meat it can find, and it's a damn shame if that happens to be you.

For the counterargument: What about foxes? To my understanding, they are not as social as wolves. And one Russian scientist essentially made "dogs" our of them after breeding the most docile specimens together for a few years.
 
For the counterargument: What about foxes? To my understanding, they are not as social as wolves. And one Russian scientist essentially made "dogs" our of them after breeding the most docile specimens together for a few years.

Foxes are small and wouldn't tackle a rival animal as big as a human being.
 
For the counterargument: What about foxes? To my understanding, they are not as social as wolves. And one Russian scientist essentially made "dogs" our of them after breeding the most docile specimens together for a few years.

Foxes are small and wouldn't tackle a rival animal as big as a human being.

Also, the process of domesticating those foxes involved killing every single one that was too aggressive so they wouldn't pass aggressive instincts on to the next generation.

Second, Foxes live in a family unit of a male, a female, and their offspring, so they are still much more social than Jaguars.

Third, Mesoamerican wars had moved towards reducing casualties on the battlefield so that more prisoners could be captured for sacrifices. Letting Jaguars loose on the battlefield would be counter productive to that goal.
 
First of all, you can domesticate cats but you can't really train them. (With one notable exception: the cheetah, but that one is an outlier) So using large cats for warfare would work in Avatar, or in the old He-Man cartoons, but not here on Earth.

However, cats can be thought not to be shy of humans, tolerate them and even interact with them socially once they figure out that it is beneficial for them to be 'cute' rather then fierce. For the large cats like Jaguar and Couguar, I see little chance. Human settlements have very little that they can eat that Humans would be glad to get rid off (like mice and other vermin for housecats). That being said: some of the smaller cats like the ocelot and jaguarundi might be 'employed' as pest control provided human settlements offer a more abundant food sourced then the jungle around. With recently more and more wildlife moving into the cities, may be we will see the day where semi-feral ocelots will lay dead rats on your doorsteps as a thank-you for all the milk you leave out.

In Colorado and surrounding states, there actually is a documented case where a creature called the 'miners cat' would follow gold diggers into their mines to hunt the mice and other critters hiding there. Eventually it would discover that not only did they have nothing to fear from the human but even that acting cute could earn them a corner of their packed lunch. So they 'domesticated themselves' and became the miner's companions. But strictly speaking the 'miners cat' is not a feline but rather a species of ringtail related to the raccoon.
 
Just for the record guys, Tenochtitlan had a royal zoo filled with a variety of creatures, including jaguars. A lot of their meat included human flesh from sacrifices. Not that they would ever use them for war, anyway, but the fact that they had a zoo filled with jaguars and pumas and bears (oh my) implies they knew how to take somewhat decent care of them.

https://books.google.com/books?id=J...Ch1iLAId#v=onepage&q=tenochtitlan zoo&f=false

http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/ask-us/how-do-we-know-tenochtitlan-had-a-zoo

Big cats, pretty much any large predator really, are quite useful as executionary animals. Quite the spectacle, too. Hence the infamous lion's den.

In Colorado and surrounding states, there actually is a documented case where a creature called the 'miners cat' would follow gold diggers into their mines to hunt the mice and other critters hiding there. Eventually it would discover that not only did they have nothing to fear from the human but even that acting cute could earn them a corner of their packed lunch. So they 'domesticated themselves' and became the miner's companions. But strictly speaking the 'miners cat' is not a feline but rather a species of ringtail related to the raccoon.
That's really interesting.
 
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