Domestication.

Indoor pets are not even close to in line or harmony with Scripture.
Adoration of pets is , well, quite common, even in people who have no friendship with other people.
Perhaps in some / many? / cases, it is God's Way of granting some kind of relief in this world , a harsh harsh world/society, today.

"Wild" animals have been tamed and very remarkable testimonies the last hundred years - "Elephant Whisperer", is one of the most recent I've seen and read a little about.
On OETA/PBS education tv they show perfectly calm, walking around with little children, rhinocerouses, ostriches, elephants, and much more ..... animals not afraid of men, and families re-habilitating/healing/ reserves to restore "wild" animals after they've been shot or abandoned orphans ....
etc etc etc ....

Ken Rank said:

The same thing that causes humans to develop different characteristics. A person closer to the equator will be darker and also taller and skinnier because that allows heat the better escape. A person raised in the extreme north will be lighter, shorter, and stockier as that retains heat. Animals adapted too, as they migrated and were exposed to different conditions.

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Agreed. There is also natural selection involved (by that I do NOT mean evolution) but that cats/animals in a particular environment will be more successful if they are better suited to that environment

Superhero Sam said:

Do you think if Adam and eve never sinned, there would be domestication and domestic animals?

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Your question has a clearer answer than your probably realize.

Just taking the text of Genesis as the base, there are a few things to realize from the very beginning, before the Fall.

First, Eve, and the various other mammals, were made with breasts. Milk drinking was intended to mankind from the beginning. In the modern world we do not do this, but in various ancient societies around the world...I'll skip the rest of that detail because it's distracting from the point.

Second, when mankind was made, before the Fall, he was given rulership over the animals.

Third, when Adam named the animals, they are divided in the text into different types, with a distinction between the herd mammals (who are also, incidentlally, the milk-bearing clean mammals) and the wild mammals. There was a distinction from the beginning, before the Fall, at the time of the first naming of the animals, between the tame mammals - which are domesticated for milk - and the wild ones (which are not).

Fourth, out of the Garden, the children of Adam and Eve were herding milk animals. Hevel ("Abel") gave of the milk of his ewes as a gift to YHWH. Man didn't start eating meat (legally) until authorized after the Flood, but the first gifts given by men to God were of food: milk and plants.

God formally told mankind to eat the plants at creation, and he gave man meat to eat after the Flood, but at no point does God formally give man milk to drink - yet it is implied from creation itself, by the human breasts, by the distinction between tame and wild animals, and by the herding of sheep by Hevel and his offering of milk - which is NOT food gained "by the sweat of the brow", but through the peaceful (non-killing, non-carnivorous) dominion over the tame animals.

Adam and Eve in the Garden were probably lacto-vegetarians. For in a world where wild animals don't shed blood, and where man has dominion, yet a distinction is made between herd and wild animals - and where God never formally says "You can drink milk", but clearly men do, what PURPOSE the distinction or the designation.

And the fact that the first gift to God, an acceptable one, was the milk of the ewes of his flock by Hevel.

Domesticated animals were created and lived in Eden. It's actually there in Scripture, if you read carefully and think about the implications of what you are reading. You have to make some inferences that are not affirmatively stated.

God never in the Scripture affirmatively gave milk to man to drink, but he made Hawah with breasts, and he accepted Hevel's offer of sheep milk.

If animals are not killed for meat, what purpose is either dominion or herding them? Answer: milk.

Anguspure said:

Not really.
Natural and Anthropogenic selection is the reason that the feline family has diversified from the Noahic pair, just as for any other animal kind that exhibits speciation.

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There hasn't been enough time from Noah to now to have [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] cats and lions descend from a single species on the ark.

Clearly natural selection, the molecular fiddler is not equivalent or capable of being equivalent to Creator-less origin and development of biological forms.

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Natural selection isn't a molecular fiddler . . . that would be mutations. Do you suppose mutations and natural selection operate without God?

Paul of Eugene OR said:

There hasn't been enough time from Noah to now to have [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] cats and lions descend from a single species on the ark.

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So they say.....

Natural selection isn't a molecular fiddler . . . that would be mutations. Do you suppose mutations and natural selection operate without God?

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Natural selection acts on mutations. Mutations generally occur at a molecular level by chance, but then as the Rabbi said "Coincidence is not a kosher word."
Nevertheless, if a mutation serves to increase reproductive fitness in a population living in a given environment then the likelihood of it being preserved through survival of the fittest aka Natural Selection is increased.
The reference to the molecular fiddler is from the book Undeniable by Douglass Axe and it refers to the limitations of the NS process being that of a fine tuning mechanism only and as having no creative capability
Do I think any of this can operate without the infuence of the Creator? Of course not! In Him and by Him all things hold together.

Superhero Sam said:

So wolves and coyotes are dogs? Their nature and appearance is similar.

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You would probably get more accurate answers to a lot of these questions if you cracked open a biology book, or did a google search.

Wolves, coyotes, and dogs have similar genetic makeups, anatomy and appearance, and behavior, making them all part of the Canis genus. Canis - Wikipedia

Wolves are not dogs and dogs are not wolves, but dogs and wolves are both Canids.

nonaeroterraqueous said:

The assumption is that they all evolved from a common ancestor.

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No. It's no more an assumption than the idea that the US civil war happened. It's based on evidence - and not just evidence, but evidence from many different fields, all of which shows the same conclusion. Some of the evidence that biologists use to conclude that cats (felidae) evolved from a common ancestor includes:

DNA evidence. This is the same as the conclusion of DNA evidence to prove paternity. There are many different type of DNA evidence. One is endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), which we know are formerly live viruses that are now embedded in cat DNA. We know that ERVs are former viruses not only because it's an obvious match, but also because scientists have isolated ERV DNA and produced live viruses with it. These form a nested hierarchy, which is a tell-tale sign of descent. "Design" doesn't explain it, because there is no need to design in virus carcasses, much less to arrange them in a nested hierarchy. Here is one such peer-reviewed paper. Identification and characterization of diverse groups of endogenous retroviruses in felids
Other DNA evidence includes pseudogenes, repeats, chromosome structure, gene location, and much more, all of which also form a nested hierarchy. These obviously aren't design features, as they are non-functional genes, like our vitamin C Gulop gene. In cats, one example of many is the gene that allows us to taste sweet tastes - it's a pseudogene in cats. Chromosome fusion also shows up as yet another example of DNA evidence of cat evolution, which is why old world cats have 18 and a different lineage has 19 chromosomes, just like our 24 to 23 chromosome fusion (chromosomes 5 and 6 fusing to make chromosome 2).

Fossil evidence - there are literally hundreds of transitional felidae fossils, which form several nice lines of descent from early common ancestors like Proailurus and Pseudaelurus, all the way to cats that are alive today. While the literally thousands of scientific, peer reviewed papers on cat history would take forever to read, a good overview for the layman of many of the transitional fossils and other cat history is here, in chapters 2 and 3 : The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives: Mauricio Antón, Alan Turner, F. Clark Howell: 9780231102292: Amazon.com: Books

Protein structure - these again form a nested hierarchy, with the silent protein analogs also forming a nested hierarchy (which can't be a design feature because silent protein analogs function identically).

Anatomical features also form a hierarchical structure, and further match the fossil evidence.
There's more, but even one of those is probably enough.

nonaeroterraqueous said:

The assumption on top of that assumption is that the common ancestor lived in the oligocene era. The assumption on top of that assumption is that the oligocene era was 25 million years ago.

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Again, false. The age is a conclusion based on the agreement of many different dating methods, which rely on different physical phenomena. If those methods were wrong, they wouldn't "just happen" to all give the same ages. It also matches DNA molecular clock data.

nonaeroterraqueous said:

They are defined based on what they are right now, even if you're an evolutionist.

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Using evidence from right now to understand what happened in the past still means it's defined by the past. For instance, the boundaries of the Navajo reservation are defined by the Navajo treaty of 1868, and the fact that you can read the treaty today doesn't mean that it didn't happen in 1868.

Whether you understand or accept the reasons why biologists (most of whom are Christians, btw) agree that cats are defined as those creatures descended from a common ancestor in the oligocene is irrelevant to the fact that they do so.

In Christ-

Papias

Superhero Sam said:

Do you think if Adam and eve never sinned, there would be domestication and domestic animals?

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All animals would be equally treated.