>>107252
I see. Well, some primates pair-bond and some don't. Primates are mostly pretty social, with exceptions, and most of the exceptions are branches of the primate family that diverged from what became humans many millions of years back. Felines generally tend to be solitary ambush hunters and stalkers, but domestic cats in urban areas where there is a high population density can congregate in "colonies" in which they demonstrate a great deal of very complex social behavior. I assume this behavior is instinctive rather than learned, but I don't know whether the domestic cat's closest non-domesticated relatives would behave the same way in the same kind of environment, or whether the centuries of selective breeding at the hands of humans have altered their instincts that drastically. On the face of it, it seems intuitive to me that pair-bonding would be favored by natural selection, as litters with both parents providing for them would be more likely to survive than those where the mother alone provides. The fact that we don't see a lot of monogamous pair-bonding among mammals in nature tells me that my intuition must be wrong here.
I don't know how likely it is that a species of sapient cats with opposable thumbs would create a civilization much like our own. It looks like the main limitations on the size of a feral cat "colony" are resources and shelter, rather than any kind of emergent complex behavior where the cats of an established colony cooperate to keep away outsiders. Feral cats in colonies will groom one another, and sometimes mother cats that give birth near the same time in close proximity will cooperate to nurse one another's kittens, particularly if the mother cats are themselves litter-mates. There are supposedly reports of multiple cats cooperating to hunt, but I can find no real details. Beyond that it seems like any troop of baboons or pack of wolves cooperates vastly more efficiently and effectively on much larger scales, for longer periods of time. For me this calls into question the likelihood of sapient cats to organize in anything like our concept of the nation-state. Of course, on a certain level, every living thing is the enemy of every other living thing, and every group of living things is a competitor for resources needed by every other group of living things, and whichever group of sapient cat people first develops the capacity for such large-scale organization and cooperation is going to exterminate every other group very, very quickly, and thereafter every one that's still alive will be the descendants of the ones who came up with the concept and had the capacity to make it a reality.
It sounds like a not particularly pleasant world for humans. Pity the poor bastard who got dropped into it.
