Why Cat People are Liberals and Dog People are Conservative

Yeah, it's a gross overstatement.  I know devout liberals who love dogs, and conservatives with cats, but there is a trend out there where the urban people that vote predominantly liberal prefer cats as house pets, while the rural rednecks prefer dogs.  Is there a reason other than the relative ease of having cats in the city, and the utility of dogs in rural life?  Is there a preference based on their politics and the perception of the role of government in the family? 

I ran into this intriguing blog post in a comment thread at Althouse:

Big Cats, and human relationships

Ever watch a Big Cat Video? That is, a National Geographic or similar production on cheetahs, or lions, or leopards, etc. Back in the VCR, pre-On Demand days, I gave my husband a boxed set for Christmas one year, though we haven't watched them lately, even though I suppose that now they're probably readily available.

The same storyline repeats itself regardless of species (except for lions): the hapless female struggles to feed her cubs single-handedly, while a predatory male lurks in the background, at best useless, at worst, a danger to the cubs. Somewhere early in the program, one of the cubs dies, maybe eaten by hyenas, but by the end, after much struggle, the cubs usually make it to adulthood, thanks to the endless search for food by their dedicated mother.

Sounds like a  story out of the Washington Post about once a week.  I'm sure the story is told in all the major metropolitan papers with some regularity.

Don't you, sometimes, in your more pessimistic moods, wonder if that's where human relationships are headed? A mother and children as the family unit, and the male as a lone individual? Of course, the mortality rate in the Big Cat world is hardly something we'd tolerate (your kid died because you couldn't feed it? Too bad, but no big deal, since you've still got another one.) but we solve that with food stamps and other welfare benefits at this point anyway.

It makes you wonder, though -- has there been any society which organizes itself this way, in which the father is not expected to be responsible for his children?

We might also take note of a recent book on cats, which, while noting that cats probably just think of us as bigger, non-aggressive cats, notes that:

The current domestic cat population remains in a semi-feral state, Bradshaw argues, because 85 percent of cat-matings are “arranged by cats themselves.” The result of remaining in this semi-feral state is that they behave toward humans as they would to other cats — but not just any other cat, Bradshaw claims, but their mother.

On the other hand, the wolf, the progenitor of the dog, has a rich family life. The pack is headed by a mated pair, the alpha male and female, who produce all the pups. The remainder of the pack is extended family; uncles, aunts and children of the alpha pair, with the whole pack taking part in the feeding and rearing of the pups. As human families do, they have their hierarchies, their spats and their fallings out.

Dogs, to some extent, have lost that strict family life.  I doubt that life in domestication was favorable to the strict breeding pair model.  However, dogs still have a strong pack instinct and a tendency to form dominance hierarchies when kept together and it's reasonable to suggest that they see "their" people as members of their pack, for whom they owe some fealty?

Wombat-Socho has this week's Rule 5 Sunday post "Under the Wire" in, well, under the wire.