Gut Feelings: How Microbes Shape Cat Behavior with Dr. Tom Gilbert

What if the path from feral to friendly begins in the gut? We sit down with evolutionary biologist Dr. Tom Gilbert to explore how cat microbiomes act like tiny chemical factories, converting food into signals that can shape fear, calm, vigilance, and even training success. Drawing on a global shelter study across Denmark, Malaysia, Cabo Verde, Brazil, Spain, and Aruba, Tom explains why geography and diet change which microbes take root—yet similar biochemical functions keep showing up in feral versus household cats. That pattern hints at a quiet engine behind behavior: microbial metabolites that reach the brain and nudge temperament at the edges.

We unpack why domestic cats often host carbohydrate-digesting microbes, how feral diets drive broader microbial toolkits, and why early-life seeding can set long-lasting trajectories. The conversation turns practical for rescuers and guardians: could slow, thoughtful diet shifts and prebiotic strategies reduce arousal and stress in shelters or at home? What are the real limits of probiotics, and when does the “garden” of gut microbes resist change without a reset? Along the way, we wrestle with ethics—should we try to calm animals through diet—and examine obesity, energy harvest, and the challenge of tailoring nutrition to an individual cat’s biology.

The bigger story reaches into domestication. If microbes could buy time for genetic change, did they help early humans live alongside once-wary animals? We compare cats and canids, question what “tame” really means, and consider how behavior, diet, and environment entangle over generations. Whether you work in shelters, foster kittens, or want a healthier, happier home for your cat, this conversation blends fresh science with grounded advice you can test gently and safely. If this sparked new questions for you, follow, share with a cat-loving friend, and leave a review—then tell us: what would you try first to nudge a microbiome toward better welfare?

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review wherever you listen
For more information and to support our podcast, check out our website at hissandtellpodcast.com
You can also find us on Instagram @hissandtellpodcast. To book my services as a cat behaviorist go to https://www.cattitude-adjustment.com/

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Topic Setup
• 0:41 Tom’s Path To Microbiome Research
• 2:13 Microbes As Chemical Factories
• 3:14 Domestication Puzzles And A New Hypothesis
• 4:18 The Global Cat Shelter Study Design
• 6:12 Geography, Diet, And Microbial Diversity
• 7:32 Behavior Links And Shared Functions
• 9:18 Practical Welfare Implications
• 11:00 Ethics, Diet Tweaks, And Calmness
• 12:31 Early-Life Seeding And Socialization
• 14:06 Antibiotics, Probiotics, And Limits
• 16:08 Obesity, Energy Harvest, And Diet Fit
• 17:15 Personalization Challenges For Pets
• 18:34 Are We Feeding Cats Wrong?
• 20:05 Beyond Cats: Taming, Wolves, And Big Questions
• 22:15 Speculation, Definitions, And Open Threads
• 24:05 The Future of Microbiome Research in Animals
• 32:22 The Impact of Maternal Microbiome on Kittens
• 35:22 Antibiotics and Their Effects on Microbiomes
• 38:22 The Challenges of Altering Microbiomes
• 42:11 Personalized Nutrition for Cats
• 47:55 Dietary Impacts on Cat Behavior and Health
• 55:46 Exploring Domestication and Taming of Cats
• 57:46 The Future of Animal Domestication Research

Transcript

Kristiina Wilson: 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to season three of Hiss and Tell. Today my guest is Tom Gilbert. He's an evolutionary biologist, and we're going to talk all about the role of the gut microbiome in shaping behavior and health of cats. We are going to talk about his research, the implications for animal welfare, complexities of domestication, and the potential for microbiome modulation to improve animal health and behavior. So come along and get into the discussion with us. Hi, and welcome to Hiss Intel. I am your host, Christina Wilson, and with me today is Thomas Gilbert. He is an evolutionary biologist. Welcome, Thomas.

Tom Gilbert: 0:37

Thank you. Excited to be here.

Kristiina Wilson: 0:40

Excited to have you. Um, so can you tell me a little bit about your background and what drew you to this particular study that we're going to talk about, which is about cats and their gut microbiomes?

Tom Gilbert: 0:52

Absolutely. I mean, I am, as you said, an evolutionary biologist, and for the past uh 20 or so years, I've mainly worked on the big things we see around us every day. Um, both wild things but also um tame things. I've been very interested in taming, for example, how do our ancestors tame the wolf into the dog and and so on. But about uh 10 years ago, I uh went through a bit of a revolution in my head when I started to um read the results of certain papers that were starting to point to the fact that the microbes that in particular live inside the guts of many animals do a lot more than just digest the food, which is kind of how we view them, right? We view that we we eat things and the microbes help us get nutrients out of them. But there are a number of papers that were coming out, firstly, actually in the human medical context, linking various human diseases to microbes. For example, there were arguments that, for example, obesity can actually be made worse or driven by certain communities of microbes living inside inside the host and so on. And also things like arthritis, for example, and allergies and so on. But I think for me, as a, I'm not really a human studying person, for an animal plant person, what really got me interested was results coming out showing how microbes inside animals can also create other sorts of traits that you don't tend to associate with with eating. So, for example, people were showing that the behavior of certain animals actually can be modified by exactly which microbes are living inside it. Um these are a range of behaviors, things, for example, like passive behavior versus aggressive behavior, but also traits more like what temperature do they feel comfortable living at or so on. And I found this really, really fascinating. It seems a bit weird at first, but actually it makes complete sense because if you think about what a gut microbe is, it sits inside you, down after your stomach in the rest of your gut. And the microbes sit there waiting for whatever you eat, and they then break down what you eat and make chemicals from it. And what do chemicals do? They affect the body. That's why we take all sorts of drugs that are produced like by uh pharmaceutical companies, right? We just take these drugs because they affect the body. So if these microbes are tiny little factories creating drugs from whatever they eat, these drugs have the potential to affect the host, whether it is to affect how they behave or the temperature they like or or the health or so on. So it did make a lot of sense. But what for me got me interested next was like, well, are there processes that we think about that might be relevant for evolutionary biology questions that maybe we've tried to explain in another way in the past, using the conventional study of the genetics of the host, that maybe alternatively could be at least partially or fully explained by the microbes instead.

Kristiina Wilson: 3:38

Can you give us a little bit of a brief overview of the study that we're talking about, which is called, for people who want to look it up, functional insights into the effect of feralization on the gut microbiota of cats worldwide?

Tom Gilbert: 3:50

It's more exciting than it sounds.

Kristiina Wilson: 3:52

I think it is actually really exciting.

Tom Gilbert: 3:54

This is actually the study that changed everything that I think when I went from being someone who just looks at the big organisms to looking at their microbes. And basically, it derived from this interest that I've had in a long time, which is how do we actually change the behavior of what we domesticate rapidly, right? So forget about cats for a minute. I apologize for on the hiss and tell for going away from cats, but that's okay. If you think about the the evil rival, the dog, as I mentioned to you earlier, I'm I have a dog myself. We know that 20 plus thousand years ago, our ancestors, this was before we had towns and villages, our ancestors somehow started living with and alongside wolves and eventually by selecting on the puppies any every generation for more and more tame-like behavior, tamed them from a wolf into a dog, right? And the the take-home of this is that you can generally take a baby and put it next to a dog and it won't eat it, but you probably can't put a baby so easily next to a wolf. There's been a big change in behavior, right? Regular geneticists who have looked at this question for a long time. They've basically looked at what genes are in wolves and what genes are in dogs, and they've looked for differences in the genes that maybe have something to do with behavior. And when they do this, they actually find that there is a whole range of genes that differ between dogs and wolves, and many of them affect the nervous system, right? And this makes sense. When you're selecting on behavior, you're probably selecting on the nervous system and so on. So that's great. We all thought we understood how we changed behavior, whether it was a wolf to a dog or a wild cat to a cat or a wild horse to a horse, the idea was we we we changed these genes.

Speaker 3: 5:34

Right.

Tom Gilbert: 5:34

There is a little bit of a problem though with this. While we know the end product after 20 plus thousand years, if you think about what actually happened, our ancestors started living with the first wolves that had the first puppies that didn't have all these changes in the genome. And you don't just overnight make all these changes and have bingo a puppy with all the changes that make it nice and calm, right, and relaxed. So I was always like, how do we explain the fact that it must have taken quite a long time where we had to live alongside many generations of wolves that hadn't been selected on yet, hadn't had their behavior changed? And I mean, how do you explain this, right? Because you can't live alongside a wolf now and do that. And this is actually when I started thinking, hey, I've seen these people reporting that in certain animals they see a behavioral link of gut microbes and behavior, right? People would, for example, sequence uh the microbes of different lines of rats, and they would find very aggressive rats would have quite different microbes to very tame rats or so on. And they would sequence the microbes of packs of feral dogs and tame dogs and see sort of differences. And I was starting to think, I wonder if the solution to this problem is that when we first started taming all these wild animals, in the time when we hadn't had enough time to change the genome, did we maybe change their gut microbes in a way that maybe changed their behavior in a way that maybe gave us enough time that we could then do the rest of the selection over many, many generations? So I had this idea in my head, but I wanted to test it. And I was thinking about various ways to test it. And actually, this is when cats came into my mind. Uh, and there's a number of reasons for this. Uh basically, I remember having been told at one point at University or saying that if you find a feral cat, and here we mean a cat that basically is derived from a tame cat lineage, so it is, it's not wild cat, it's it's the tame cats that have left living with humans, they've gone out to live as strays. For example, they've had babies, and the babies have grown up being born away from humans, living without human interaction. I was always told that if you find one when it's very, very, very small, the first few weeks of its life, and bring it back into a human environment, it will actually grow up fairly tame. But if you wait too long, they're basically untamable if you define that as with the behavior of a fully normal domestic fully, fully that. This is anyway, what I was told a while back.

Kristiina Wilson: 8:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

Tom Gilbert: 8:03

And and my thought was like, well, why is that? Because we were told, well, it's just because when they're a baby, they have to get used to humans and the brain gets wired the right way and so on.

Kristiina Wilson: 8:10

The socialization period, yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 8:11

Exactly right. But the interesting thing about microbes is it is known that in animals, you are extremely susceptible to having your gut microbes sort of preconditioned by the first few weeks of your life. Which to me is interesting because then if you get yourself a very early kitten, you know, a couple of weeks old, and you start introducing microbes from your home into it, that might establish a different community to if you get it maybe when it's eight, 10, 12, 15 weeks, when it's microbes are already established by the wild. So I basically was like, can we test this? And this is where my former student Mandy uh had the idea of let's talk to cat shelters because she um is a cat lady, she's got a lot of cats, um, a lot of kids and a lot of cats. But she uh had been in contact actually firstly with a local shelter in Denmark, a shelter that's a sort of a trap and neutering program, and released the cats again. And she said, Well, you know, would we be able to come into you and would you be able to tell us which of your cats have you received directly from homes versus which ones have you maybe, you know, trapped as strays or ferals? Right. And would we be able to sample their poo? It's not very glamorous, but that's all you do. You take their poo. And would you let us do a behavioral test on them just to see, like, you know, what is the behavior? Because just because a cat is caught stray, of course, it may have been just escaped from it might be behaviorally very different to the other one, right? So we need that behavioral control. And they said, sure, yeah, come and get the samples. So we got a load of samples. But she, being industrious, then started writing to lots of other cat shelters. And in the end, we ended up working on data from cat shelters in six countries. So we have Denmark, but we also have Malaysia, we have Cabo Verde, we have uh Brazil, Spain, and Aruba, right? All of these are the same kind of shelters. The cats come in, they're new to their released again. But in all these places, we could get poo, we could do a behavioral assessment, and uh we of course knew if they were domestic, you know, derived straight from, sorry, from a family, from a home versus trapped in the wild or feral straight, whatever. And so the nice thing was we have this situation, we have six different locations. We have the behavioral thing, and we thought, well, let's just look at the microbes inside them and see what we see. But for example, if there might be microbes that are somehow contributing to one of the behavioral extremes, making them maybe calmer, which you might express, you know, in the household, maybe, you know, I know not all household cats are calm. I used to have a cat that would love to jump on my ankles at 2 a.m. But you know, generally used to living in with among humans, not showing that fear response. And if we have microbes living in cats that are maybe showing the fear response, because maybe they were born fairly and not been used to the humans, would we see differences? Would we see differences that are consistent across geography, or would it be unique in every situation? And that's basically what we started doing. So we just started sequencing their poo, looking for the microbes, and then exploring both what microbes are there, what essentially what species are microbes, but also what do the microbes actually do? What biochemically can they do? What can they digest and produce, or so on, and then to try and see do we see any patterns? And you found we did find patterns, some not surprising, some surprising. At the not surprising end, basically, depending on where your cat comes from, they that really affects which microbes live inside them. This is not a surprise. If we were to sequence you and me, just because we live in different continents and countries, we will have different microbes because we're eating different things, we're drinking different water, we the environment around us is different, right? So a very strong geographic effect. And but then we started to see some patterns that made sense. If we just consider the cats which are feral versus domestic, um, there was a generally there were big picture differences in the microbes. The domestic cats generally have quite a limited range of microbes inside them. And that's probably because they're really getting pretty consistent food on the whole, right? They're getting kibble, they're getting pre-made cat food. They're not foraging and eating all sorts of exciting things that a wildcat gets. So just that diversity of what the astrays or the ferals are getting, it just means they're bringing in more foods, and that means they need more microbes to do things with it, right? So that wasn't a surprise, but it was it was nice to see that. And this is consistent with what you see actually if you study feral versus non-feral populations of other animals as well. Then what we started to see was we could look at what these microbes actually do, and again, it kind of made sense. So, for example, the the cats that are derived from homes really have microbes that digest carbohydrate, right? Which is uh kind of important and kind of interesting. Because of course, what is a cat? A cat is a carnivore that naturally doesn't eat much carbohydrate. And actually, modern cat food and actually modern dog food as well is very, very carb-rich in general. Not always you can buy fancy ones that aren't. Right. And the funny thing is, genetically, both domestic dogs and cats are not naturally or are not the ideal animals for digesting carbohydrate. There has been some degree of selection on to do that. But the but the fact is to really get all the nutrients out of the carbs, it really helps to have microbes with them that can digest those carbs, right? And so it makes sense that when they eat them, they need microbes with special capacity to help them break it down. So that didn't surprise too much. And at the other extreme, when we look at the feral cats, um they tend to have, again, a much more maybe interesting range of microbes that can digest all sorts of other things, right? But actually less carbohydrate because they're not really getting much of that, right? So that all makes sense. But then the question is, what about behavior? And this is where it did get kind of interesting. So although basically we didn't see the same species of microbes at every geographical location, we did see that the microbes that are associated with the feral cats at the different locations tended to produce and also degrade certain chemicals, which really stood out because they've been observed in other studies as being linked to behavior in certain ways. So, for example, vitamin B12 precursors was one of the things, right? And this is quite well known to actually have an effect on behavior. How they affect behavior is one of the big unknowns often in these things, but often they see these have things have an effect, right?

Kristiina Wilson: 14:18

Right.

Tom Gilbert: 14:19

Basically, we were seeing that there was a lot of these potential chemicals being produced by the microbes in the feral cats that may well be somehow affecting the behavior, right? And this, again, it's very hard to say they are, but they're certainly consistent with evidence from other studies on things like tamed foxes and non-tamed foxes and mice and rats and so on, that they are things that we know can affect the brain, right? And so this does start to suggest that either in the feral situation, there are microbes affecting the brain, which maybe are making them more skittish or wary, or maybe just giving them what they probably need, which is a predator awareness, right? And you know, you're nice living in those situations. You've got to be much more aware and switched on, right? The flip side is it could be the other way that because they're not in the cats in the human environment, the domestic ones, right, that behaviors can be toned down because they haven't got them producing them, right? And which way it goes is hard to say. It might be going both ways, but definitely there were these quite striking patterns that there were differences in what was being produced that absolutely could be affecting the behaviors, right?

Kristiina Wilson: 15:25

Yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 15:26

So, and again, the thing was, although it was different species of microbes doing this in the different locations, the functions, what they could do was was quite similar across them, right? So it suggested it's a fairly universal effect that there is some kind of effect. And that effect is probably being driven by the diet they're eating, but also what they're being exposed to the whole time. Because if you uh need a certain microbe to produce a certain chemical to make your brain maybe more active and more wary, you've still got to meet that microbe in the first place. And if that's not found in the home, you'll never get it, so on.

Kristiina Wilson: 15:59

Right.

Tom Gilbert: 16:00

But to us, I think that was kind of the surprising thing was that actually there was this signal there, right? Now I say we as with many of these studies, it's very hard to say exactly what they're doing, but it just again and again and again came up as things that have been seen in other situations, which did seem to be, well, that's kind of striking. The microbes are at play again, somehow potentially shaping behavior.

Kristiina Wilson: 16:22

It's so interesting. I noticed when I read the study that the cats from Brazil and the cats from Spain had similar gut microbiota. Do you have any idea why that would be?

Tom Gilbert: 16:33

Well, yeah, I mean, that's a really, really key point. And it probably, in my view, comes down to similarities in the environment that they're living in. So, yes, while Aruba is close to Brazil, the Brazilian city may be more actually ecologically similar to the city in Spain they came from, right? Um and I actually, I was just trying to find this out. I should somewhere have the exact details on where the shelters, and I couldn't look that up. But I'm pretty sure it's to do with that. Another thing is these cats are, of course, brought to the shelter where they live for a certain amount of time and they're being fed certain foods in there, and it could simply be that the Brazilian and the Spanish shelter are providing them with a more similar kibble, for example, than the other one. Having said that, the similarity is also found in the feral ones, but again, that could prove uh point to the fact that just what is available for them to eat in the feral situation is more similar in Spain and Brazil. If Spain and Brazil tend to be both in cities, for example, and Aruba is maybe a more slightly rural thing, they'll get access to different things. But this is this very, very, very strong effect you always see of the environment on these things. But the funny thing again for us is that even when you have such a strong environmental effect, when you then see underneath it still these kind of big picture patterns coming that does suggest that that there is more going on than just randomness. And and this is cats is one thing, this has been seen, and we've done stuff on dogs and chickens and uh even tamed foxes, and we consistently see these kind of bizarrely consistent uh patterns, even when the environment varies.

Kristiina Wilson: 18:06

Yeah, no, I mean I think that's so interesting, and there's so much talk about in humans, also the gut brain axis. And I know my wife is always talking about it just anecdotally, like I'm hearing from her. So I think it's it's such an interesting study. And do you think that there's other ways in which a cat or or other animals microbiome can actually influence its behavior?

Tom Gilbert: 18:25

Absolutely, there's a huge amount of interest right now in this in both the human health context, but also the animal health context, the animal welfare context, uh just understanding wild animal behavior, right? And I mean, people do look in humans, and humans are a terrible model because Well, sure. Humans have unfortunately too much freedom and will and don't do things controlled. But people showed quite early on, for example, that you can take, for example, rats and you can do what's called a dominance test, where you just have like a glass tube and you put two rats in and one will just push the other one out, the dominant one. And they show that you can actually flip their microbiomes and reverse the behavior, right? So you can see these quite striking differences by flipping the behaviors. And again, what's probably happening is certain metabolites are being produced by the microbes that then are received in the brain in different ways. And there are subtleties to this. For example, genetic differences between the animals might change how they interact with the microbes and things. But in general, the idea is if you if the microbes can affect the behavior, if you can then modify the microbes either by force-feeding specific microbes to people, this is basically what probiotics are, to be honest and just by changing the diet naturally so it encourages certain microbes, you could then have a knock-on and behavior. And and and this is very relevant for a number of reasons. For example, I have colleagues uh who work in a primate sanctuary in Spain, and uh they, you know, they have these, I think, chimpanzees that they would like to reintroduce to the wild. But these chimpanzees have come from zoos or other horrible places, you know, circuses and so on. And they've been eating a very artificial diet, right? And that means the microbes are probably very artificial inside them. They're probably affecting the behavior in a certain way, right? And so the thought then is well, can we start introducing a more natural diet to try and push the microbiome and make it more natural to make maybe the metabolites being produced more natural in a way that maybe will affect their behavior, right? And this may sound crazy, but this is basically what's happening in these cats. The fact that the diets are pushing the microbes in a way and the behaviors are diverging, they could be this kind of link, right? Um, it's quite fun in the human context as well. There's a lot of interest now in what are called short chain fatty acids, which basically are what you get if you digest fiber. If you are very good at if you have the right microbes inside you, when you eat a lot of fiber, it gets broken down into short chain fatty acids by the microbes. And these basically can induce a kind of calming state in the body, right? If you don't have them, you're much more excitable. And uh so, you know, when I've mentioned this to people, they've said, well, you know, maybe we should be uh changing all the food in prisons and schools to make it very fiber-rich, because then people will be calmer and so on. And it's a very interesting idea, and it's an ethically challenging idea because yes, if we made the food fiber rich and the microbes changed and we could make the overall level of the prison a bit calmer, then of course it takes more to push for regression to come, right? It doesn't mean people can't get angry. On the other hand, if we put fiber in the diet, because we know the microbes are going to basically produce drugs, is that any different to say, what if we put drugs in the water in a prison, right? So you start to get these kind of interesting ideas, right?

Speaker 3: 21:32

Yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 21:33

If we change the diet of a racehorse or uh to uh somehow the microbes produce certain drugs that make the racehorse, or in fact a human runner run faster, is that any different to doping? So you get all these kind of interesting situations.

Kristiina Wilson: 21:48

Huh.

Tom Gilbert: 21:49

But again, I mean, you could imagine, you know, you're probably not a fan of zoos, but zoos exist. Well, I mean, in a zoo, should they be considering diets which maybe have more metabolites produced by the microbes to induce a calming state in the animals, right? As opposed to the reverse. I mean, maybe if you give a pure speculation, maybe if you give a lion in a zoo a a lot, lot, lot, lot of meat, maybe they're just much more anxious than they would be if they were getting some kind of like more carbs in the diet. I mean, I've no idea what the answer is. But you can at least start thinking about these things and in situations and uh, you know, you can even imagine, like, again, we've got to talk about um service animals, for example, would you want to maybe condition the diet in light of what kind of service they're producing or so? And probably uh your police dog probably uh doesn't want to be completely chilled out the whole time, or at least the person doesn't want it to be. Whereas your your uh your service dog for the blind, for example, probably you'd want to modify it that way. So there are all sorts of thoughts you can have when you accept that the microbes, in interacting with what they're given, produce drugs that can affect the body.

Kristiina Wilson: 22:53

I mean, it it gave me so many questions reading this paper that's not proper English. I had so many questions reading this paper, doing great today. Especially because uh so much of my work is socialization and and working with not only kittens who come from feral mothers, but feral cats and you know, sometimes raccoons and like and other animals that that are well past what we would normally consider a socialization window. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts are about working with animals who are considered feral via the gut microbiome and the diet. Like, if if I, for example, rescued a feral cat, could I domesticate it via its diet in part? Obviously with other bits of socialization as well, but is that part of it?

Tom Gilbert: 23:41

It's a really, really interesting question. And there are several reasons why. Firstly, the the kind of dogma is that your microbiome is very much conditioned by the earliest part of your life, right? And whatever microbes you're initially exposed to kind of set the development of the community down a pathway which is a little bit changeable later, but you're kind of constrained within a thing. And if I can give you a very simple analogy, if you have a garden and you rip up all the plants, what grows there eventually kind of depends on what seeds you throw down first, right? If you throw it down nothing, you get one kind of community, but if you throw it down grass seed, it will never become a wildflower community because the grass is established and so on. And it's kind of the same in the microbes. So the idea is that the very early exposures to the microbes pushes them down a community development, which you can change by changing the diet, but it's still constrained within a window. Having said that, it doesn't mean it's impossible, and it may simply be that it's just harder to change it later. So, for example, if you, for example, have a uh a feral cat, it's two years old, it's behaviourally quite whatever, fearful of humans. It is quite possible that if you spent enough time on it and gave it enough microbes or diet to kind of change it slowly, there would be these changes happening that would affect the behavior. What we don't know is how far it will go, and if it would be much, much faster if it was, for example, a cat which had been born in a in a household and then becomes stray and its microbes would change, but then you're pushing it back because they they kind of didn't fully change or so on.

Kristiina Wilson: 25:06

Right.

Tom Gilbert: 25:07

It may be that when people say it's hard to change it, it's because the problem, of course, as I'm sure you know, that when you have a very anxious or or fearful cat, it's just hard to spend a lot of time with it. And you need to spend time with it to change those microbes, right? It's because where do the microbes come from in the home? They come from being around you. I mean, uh, you know, it's uh if if a cat is like with you or licks you or you touch it and it licks your hand or something, you start to change shape microbes, right? And of course, when they're not having that interaction, you can't do that. Uh a really fascinating result I was once told about, and again, I apologize for going off cats onto dogs. I uh there was a study, and what people basically did was they they sequenced the microbes in the mouth of owners and dogs. And they could basically match the dog to the owner based upon the oral microbiomes, right? Because there's so much similarity between the dog microbes and the owner. Because I mean, what do dogs love to do? They love to lick you, right? And you all these owners love to kiss their dog. And even if you don't do that, I mean, I'm stroking my dog, then I put some food in my mouth and so on. And and you really do get that exchange. You also get it in family units, actually. You can actually identify groups of individuals, like uh a partner and and their kids, uh, based upon the shared microbes, if they're a functional family who you know interact with each other a lot. You can actually identify families that are non-functional for the reverse. I heard about a French team who did some work, I don't think it was published, but they they actually sequenced a load of couples uh in their workplace, and they found the the very expected result of similar microbes, except when they didn't, and it was always when they knew there was something awkward, and then occasionally would find also the wrong couple, they would find, you know, partner X from one family and partner Y from another family. So but the point is those microbes do really move around, right? And this raises a very interesting point to me, which is how much of maybe animal owner recognition, so if owner's the right word, is derived by shared microbes? I mean, my uh my dog is very wary of people it doesn't know, but if they've lived with me for three, four, five, six days, it's a whole different thing. Is that maybe because some kind of shared microbes going on and signals coming, or is it she just the classic, well, I've got used to now, I know them or so on, right? Um does my dog love our core family way more than everyone else because we do have that weird microbial bond? Because they produce drugs, they produce chemicals, they produce signals. So who knows?

Kristiina Wilson: 27:31

I don't know. Do you think things like probiotics or like diet or anything could help improve the gut health of feral or stressed cats? Like, is this is kind of doing microbiome modulation something that we can do to improve welfare in straight or even indoor cats? Is that something we should be thinking about?

Tom Gilbert: 27:51

Yeah, I mean, absolutely in theory. And and to be honest, I don't know what it's like in the US, but here there are more and more pet foods for sale which have got like stamps on the outside saying enriched with probiotic.

Kristiina Wilson: 28:02

And I I don't know what that means ever, like really.

Tom Gilbert: 28:22

So so often they have them, but at such a tidy level, it sounds like a big number, but it but it's not right. But but but there is this idea that you can do, and I know there are researchers, for example, looking at can we work with the beast cats, for example, and by modulating their gut microbiome, can we maybe help them lose weight, for example? So there is a lot of interest in it. And again, but the complication here is that just because we know a certain microbe could, for example, help produce short-chain fasci acids and make a karma state in the cat doesn't mean we can effectively change its gut microbiome to accept them. And this again is the problem. If you've got a grassy lawn outside your house and you want to make it into a grass, uh like a flowery meadow, you can't just throw down flower seeds and hope the change will happen, right? It's really an inefficient process. What you have to do is you have to rip up all your grass and throw it on grass seed. And this essentially is adding antibiotics, which is a whole nother question. Do you want to give your animantiputs and wipe out its whole microbiome community and then re-establish it with an owner? This is what people are doing with fecal microbiome transplants in humans. Kind of works, but also I'm seeing evidence which is it kind of works short term, but over the long term you kind of revert back to the stage that you were. So I think the real question is not whether changing the microbes would have an effect, but can you effectively change the microbes, right? How do we do it? Do we do it by just again and again and again hitting them with the same microbe or just by changing the food and just keeping it changed? And we don't really know how far you can naturally push it, right? And if you stop, will it go back again? But it's I don't think it's a hugely difficult thing to try. I mean, I think um You know, if you are encountering feral cats and you can just try and get them to eat kibble, you can just see does it have an effect, right? If it has an effect, it's probably because the microbes are changing. These are not, you know, expensive experiments to do, they just try and see what happens. Worst case, your feral cat won't eat your kibble. My my dog hates his kibble, it won't go near it, right? Um so so but again, it it's fairly easy to try. It's the same with humans. I mean, if it's true that uh that fiber can induce a calming state, well, you can I mean I I don't know if you've ever been to Scandinavia, but we eat these rye bread.

Kristiina Wilson: 30:28

I'm from Scandinavia.

Tom Gilbert: 30:30

Well, there you go. So I don't know if you've ever tried traditional Danish rye bread, which when I first changed it, it's like there's like black brick of you know it's uh it it's fascinating stuff because if you're not used to eating it and you eat it, you just produce enormous amounts of flatulence, right? But your regular Dane doesn't, and your regular Dane doesn't, because they've got the right microbes established to digest it, right? And and and so actually the reason, the way to change is to slowly eat it a bit at a time, a bit at a time, and slowly change your microbiome, and then you get all the short chain fatty acids out and you stop farting and everyone's happy, right? Uh yeah. But the same idea with animals. The the real problem is if you um want to make a rapid change and you rapidly change the diet, it'll probably be a disaster. But if you can slowly change it, right, just as how you can slowly tolerate eating chilies or poisons or whatever, right? Right. You want to make those slow changes, slowly include it. That to me is likely to have the biggest effect. Again, going back to the garden analogy, probably no point throwing a shitload of seeds down. But if you just slowly put down a few at a time and let it change over time, you're gonna be more successful.

Kristiina Wilson: 31:37

That makes sense. So in the corner of my eye, I have one of the cameras in in my feral room, and I have a feral mom and her three kittens. And I have been wondering since reading your study, would uh her kittens or any feral mother's kittens be impacted by her more feral gut flora? I mean, they're they're nursing. So what are they getting from her? That they're they're quite social, obviously. They've known me since they were very little. But what is the exchange there?

Tom Gilbert: 32:07

Yeah, well, the general idea is that the first time any mammal, or at least uhmal, gets exposed to microbes is is through the birth canal, right? They basically come out and they're, you know, basically babies inhale slime and whatever and they pull in the microbes that are in the mum's birth canal and so on and so on. And this actually is why there are growing concerns in the medical community actually about C-section babies, because they don't get exposed to that. And then they're not being naturally seeded. So I don't know what it's like over in the earth now, but in Denmark, you can at least request that when the baby's born, they basically get swabbed with the mother's microbes immediately to try and establish something, right? And this is controversial and not fully studied yet, but but there is this idea that's your first exposure. And then, of course, whatever your baby is experiencing in the first few days, weeks of life, when it's breastfeeding or just because it's living in a den or whatever, it's seeding the microbes, right? Now, the thing about your mother cat there and the babies, I think it very much depends where were the babies born. If they were born with the mother in the wild, if they were born in the home, because if they're born in the home, they're also getting exposed to other kinds of microbes, and that will have an effect, right? And going back to the conventional idea that animals are most susceptible for the early period of their life, then of course, the earlier they come in contact with a human, the more they will still be able to be seeded by human home environment microbes and the bigger effect they could have. Again, if you sow down a load of grass seed and the next day throw down wild gr wild flower seed, you will have a much bigger effect than if you wait six weeks first before you do it, right?

Kristiina Wilson: 33:42

Of course.

Tom Gilbert: 33:42

So, I mean, it would, you know, a really fascinating experiment would actually be to sequence the microbes of these kind of things, compare them and see what happens and how resistant are they to invasion from home microbes and so on and so on. These are all fun things one could do. But uh, you know, one could, in theory, look at the microbes of the mother, look at the microbes of the baby, see are they completely identical? Are there differences? If there are differences, are there the differences maybe related to what other cats are in the house, for example, and are they maybe affecting the babies more than the mother because they have their less established microbiome and so on? One can start to pull those things apart and see what's going on. Um it's uh yeah, so but again, I I would like to caveat that what we see is correlations, interesting correlations of microbial functions that differ alongside behavior, and they look certainly interesting and they relate to things that could be interesting, whether they have an effect is a thing that requires all sorts of follow-up studies, which are kind of hard to do, and so on and so on and so on. Um, but that is a limitation of a lot of microbe science these days. We're good at seeing patterns. Testing them's pretty tricky, both because ethically, I mean, to be honest, like some of the experiments you would ideally have to do are just not very nice experiments, just like take babies at birth and switch the mothers around, which uh you know, you will learn a lot, but yeah, do you really want to do that or so on? And it's uh, or you know, give babies antibiotics constantly and see what happens, and yeah.

Kristiina Wilson: 35:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 35:06

Not super fun experiments.

Kristiina Wilson: 35:09

Fair enough. I did notice in your study it had said that where did it go?

Speaker 2: 35:14

With the antibiotics.

Kristiina Wilson: 35:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just curious if they were eliminated, because obviously antibiotics would wipe out the gut flora. And so it just it just said, you know, participants who hit participants. The animals had been noted if they took antibiotics. And so I was just wondering if those animals were then thrown out of the study.

Tom Gilbert: 35:34

Yeah, I mean, uh, we we had basically asked that question, and of course, we only know based upon the time they arrived in the shelter, and essentially I think we had enough that hadn't that we didn't actually use those samples, right? Um we did see that the feral cats did carry microbes with functions that actually can uh can um degrade antibiotics, which is kind of interesting because that kind of suggests that they're being exposed to them. Uh but on the other hand, they might just be exposed to microbes in nature and and and that they're just naturally able to do that. So there was something there, but that's nothing to do with our cats per se that ours had been given it. Um you know, I guess it's because a lot of the cats coming to the shelters might need antibiotics because they've been found in an unfortunate situation or so on and so on, right?

Kristiina Wilson: 36:19

Yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 36:20

So it was more just a bit of metadata along with like, you know, were they male cats or female cats or old cats or young cats or right.

Kristiina Wilson: 36:27

Well, such some shelters I mean it depends on what shelter you work with, obviously, but some shelters give them prophylactically and and also do things like trazodone for three days. Every shelter obviously has its own protocol. So I'm just curious always at what's happening.

Tom Gilbert: 36:41

I believe that was the case in our one, 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that Mandy would have controlled for that. Yeah, yeah. Because it's makes it makes your life a nightmare when you study microbe safety.

unknown: 36:50

Yeah.

Kristiina Wilson: 36:51

I I would I figured, but just because it didn't say in here, and I'm always so curious about methodology and exactly what was happening. All of I I have to because I'm like an old person, I have to like print it out and highlight it and mark it up.

Tom Gilbert: 37:04

I I have to print it out to remember what we did because it was a year and a half ago. That's old person as well. Uh yeah. But you know, you know, I mean, just one of the actually surprising things we we we do occasionally we we actually have a lab where we actually do studies on on wild animals where we actually try and change their microbiome and measure them and so on. And it's really, really hard actually to eliminate a microbiome, even with antibiotics. So I mean I bet it's it's surprisingly difficult. I think this is the problem that the fecal microbiome transfer people community have that they uh they want to knock out what they have already. It's really hard to get rid of of the last vestiges of it again. Just like if you're doing your gardening, it's really hard to get rid of the last weeds, right? And so they they bounce back again and have an effect and so on and so on. And and and this is also a little bit why early life exposure is so important, because those first microbes that get in there really set the development of the community and they um really hard to budge later. And so if it is correct that C-sections are preventing human babies or in fact animal babies if they have them from getting the right microbes at birth, could this be a problem downstream, right? Because it's really, really hard to predict shift things later in some situations. But that's not to say that we can't shift it a bit, and that can't make a difference, and and that's kind of the interesting stuff.

Kristiina Wilson: 38:22

That's true. Last year I had um a mom and two babies that we rescued and they all got coccidia, which is really terrible intestinal disease. It just causes explosive diarrhea constantly. But it it really it must have done something to their microbiome because now one of them has such an eating disorder, and I think it has come from whatever happened. I don't know if there are microbes that drive I noted in the paper or that it said there were microbiomes that can drive obesity. He's only a year old, and it's like it's almost like he has like Praetor Willie, even though I know that that's not something that I even looked up, like can cats have that disorder, but they don't have those chromosomes. But it's so wild, and he had to be on a year of probiotics just to keep him from having absolutely noxious farts. And it's just it has been such a wild ride with these poor guys and just seeing that could a hundred percent be microbiome.

Tom Gilbert: 39:19

I mean, and I can tell from personal experience. I managed to, I lived in Kenya for a year back in 2012, and I got food poisoning really early on.

Speaker 3: 39:26

Oh, yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 39:26

And the the regular diarrhea and vomiting stopped really fast, but boy, did I have noxious farts continually for about uh three months until someone finally said, like, maybe you need some antibiotics.

Speaker 3: 39:35

Yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 39:36

And it fixed it straight away, right? So because what's going on is that I said your gut microbes need to be tailored for the kind of food you're eating, right? Because not every microbe can digest some kinds of fiber, for example, right? And if they can't digest it fully, they basically produce hydrogen and all these other kinds of methane and so on. This is actually the problem of people who are lactose intolerant, right? They're not able to fully digest the lactose and they produce hydrogen and then it comes out as farts and burps, right? And and often the smell is just like what else is in the gut at the same time being carried out with it. It's not necessarily the correct product, right? So, so yeah, if you get trapped with the wrong microbiome and it just can't deal with the food, what do you do? And then you well, the answer is you have to try and change it, whether it's with antibiotics or whether it's by slowly tweaking the diet or so on. Um and I mean the whole interesting thing about the the obesity and the non-obesity kind of makes sense because if you have a standard diet and you have one microbial community in one animal which is uh really efficient at digesting whatever you have and turning it into energy that's available for the body, you're just gonna get more energy coming into you than if you don't have that, right? So, of course, people who, or animals that become obese, it's because the microbes just making so much more available to the host, right? Whereas if you have essentially a really inefficient microbiome from the purpose of converting stuff into stuff humans can eat, the food goes straight through you, right? So so again, by tweaking that microbiome, you can in theory really affect these things because it's just like it's that extra step of processing before it gets absorbed into the body that's critical, right?

Kristiina Wilson: 41:08

Yeah. So I wonder if kind of extrapolating that then to back back to cats, could knowing a cat's gut microbiome become part of like a personalized behavior or health plan for cats, like in the future, obviously. Are we gonna be analyzing them and being like, oh, they should have this food and they should have this probiotic or prebiotic? Is that just insane?

Tom Gilbert: 41:31

I am sure there are people that would like to do that because there are people doing that for humans now, and there are people discussing it for dogs and so on. There is, there are a couple of caveats, and I'm on the, I'm afraid, the more caveat end here, because a general challenge for the probiotic industry or prebiotic industry, and just to be clear what they are, probiotics is when you take a culture of essentially living microbes. Prebiotic is when you take some kind of supplement which promotes the growth of certain microbes inside you, right? And these are massive industries. Probiotics is in the billions of dollars globally a year, right? Now the question is, do they really work? And the reason I say that is because there are several reasons. Firstly, as we've already discussed, it's quite hard to disturb a gut microbiome that you've already got in place anyway. Again, just like your garden, if you've got grass in there, you can throw down loads of flowers, but they might, nothing might happen, right? So a lot of the probiotics being taken might just be going straight through because inside you is already occupied by all sorts of other microbes, right? But on the other hand, there are certainly times when it can work if you've had antibiotics, or maybe you know, you just take it enough, it will happen. The second challenge, though, is that assuming that every individual reacts the same way to the probiotic is maybe a little bit problematic. Now, there's a lot of interest now in what's called personalized medicine, which is you have to condition doses of medicine based upon the genetics of the recipient, right? Right. There's the famous example of warfarin, which is a blood thinner which either kills you or does nothing, depending on who you are. Um, and you know, what are medicines? They're drugs. Where do drugs come from? A lot of them come from microbes. So if if there's a personalized response to drugs, there may well be a personalized response both to the drugs produced by microbes inside you, but also the microbes themselves. We all have different immune systems, right? So if you or I or uh my engine colleague Sham take a certain probiotic, we have to assume A, our immune systems would all respond the same to it before it establishes. B, we all respond this, well, our microbiomes will all allow it to establish anyway. And C, even if it does and it produces a metabolite, we will all respond the same to that metabolite, right? So there is a degree, I think, of personalization, which is maybe sufficiently complex that it would put off the commercial interest. Because having said that, I'm sure people will still try and sell it. And one of maybe the criticisms you could throw at probiotics is that a lot of people take them because they take it and they seem to be super healthy, but they were probably healthy before. You know, whether it was doing anything or whether it because they were healthy, it fixed it anyway. It's one of these things that's easy to take, right? But it doesn't necessarily mean it's doing something. So I would love to see personalized genomics, probiotics, so on, so on, so on. But we just don't know enough about how hard it would be. But that's not to say I'm not encouraging people to just like, you know, if you want to try and make your cat more chilled out, maybe you've got a an old tom cap getting grumpy or whatever, you don't have to maybe castrate it, maybe just try giving it more carbohydrate and see what happens, right? Give it more fiber, try and get to eat some Danish Scandinavian rye bread. You can survive the uh if you can survive the farts coming out.

Kristiina Wilson: 44:37

But yeah, I don't think anybody that would be rough.

Tom Gilbert: 44:41

But then just do it, do it slowly. Give it a tiny, tiny bit first of all. A tiny bit covered in tuna, and then slowly expand over your your weeks to get more and more rye bread and tuna into its diet.

Kristiina Wilson: 44:51

Just start giving cats weird, get like salmiaki and blood sausage and I'm pretty sure giving salmiak to cats is animal cruelty, to be honest. Yeah, I think giving it to anyone is I I I agree there, I agree there. So that's one of the finished foods I've never been able to absolutely sadly the the Danes are very onto Salmiak as well.

Tom Gilbert: 45:12

Yeah, it's inconceivable.

Kristiina Wilson: 45:13

Um I was also curious about if commercial cat food leads to less kind of a substrate for bacterial activity. Are we feeding our companion cats wrong? Like, should we be feeding them different things to encourage more activity, or are they is is it kind of a chicken and the egg scenario?

Tom Gilbert: 45:33

Well, I think there is a difference between what is good for the cat versus what's good for the owner. I imagine there are many owners who've got an indoor cat where maybe you could argue the ethically right thing would be the cat should be as chilled out as possible, so it's not going crazy, right? In which case, maybe very kibble-rich, uh, you know, a lot of kibble in the food, the carbohydrates, the the maybe various other additives that maybe could induce short chain fatty acids would be good. Now, whether that's the right thing for the cat, because of course cats naturally, if they're predators and so on, is a whole nother thing, right?

Speaker 3: 46:03

Yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 46:04

You know, there's a very ethically challenging question, often like, you know, what is good for the human is maybe not what's good for the animal. So again, but on the other hand, if you're in a farm and you want your cat to help keep the rats down, then probably you don't want to be giving it kibble, right? Yeah. But because absolutely in theory it could be affecting the behavior, and then you've got to decide like which way to go. And and I mean, I I do know I've got colleagues who are vets who are working on what should be in the feeds for both dogs and cats because there are problems of obesity in certain weeds, you know, they're prone to it, so maybe can they modify the diet in a way not just so there's less available energy in it, but it also is for a certain microbiome, which basically means there's less available energy and so on. I mean, these kind of things are definitely people are exploring them or interested. And given there are links in humans with things like microbes and arthritis, you can then be thinking about, well, should we be avoiding certain diets that promote certain microbes, which maybe would bring on arthritis to give them a longer and healthier life? There's a lot of interest in these kind of areas. Whether it's possible to make general solutions or they have to be breed-specific solutions, I will say, for example, I know there's a lot of interest in the dog world of these more natural meat-rich diets, right? Which sounds great in theory because the dog is a wolf, right? But what we know from dog domestication and genetics is that in the domestication process, we've actually created some breeds which are extremely good at digesting carbohydrate. We've basically selected on a gene called amylase, which is for just digesting amylase. And in some breeds, they have 20, 30, 40 copies of the gene, which means they're really good at digesting starch. We have other breeds, things like, for example, the traditional sled dog breeds, which have no amylase, they're like wolves still. Now, while it's very awesome to give a meat-rich diet to like a sled dog, if you're giving a meat-rich diet to these breeds like chihuahuas, which have got multiple amylase copies, they're actually good for eating carbohydrate, right? So you've got that mismatch there. And almost certainly you'll see the same thing in cat breeds, depending on what they are, not to the same extent, because of course they've always been a bit more independent-minded and doing these kinds of things. So you do need to factor in ideally the genetics of the animal, like what are they naturally able to eat and not eat, and then you can factor in what microbes can go on, and then you can factor in the effect or so on. You know, worst case, you might give them non-permanent diarrhea or they will fart a lot, which is, you know, can be quite horrible. Uh so it's not like serious medicine kind of things, but yeah, again, it's not straightforward, but they're definitely one needs to tailor at least to the kind of the breed with the pure breeds. Of course, it's not not so easy with, of course, the ones that are crossbreeds or so on on, or at least uh be open-minded. There is a degree of complexity to all this.

Kristiina Wilson: 48:40

That totally makes sense. So, what are you working on now? What's the next big question that you want to answer? And obviously, it does not have to be cat related.

Tom Gilbert: 48:48

Well, I I I am really fascinated with the domestication still, and we we've done quite a bit of work on chickens and foxes, and in particular, what are called redomestication experiments, where people actually took either what uh red jungle fowl or actually semi-wild foxes, and then they selected on them on behavioral changes in a very controlled environment to see what happens, and we see these diverging microbes and so on. And and again, what we're interested from, an evolutionary point of view, is can we actually decipher how the process works? What comes first, what comes later? Is the microbe important first? Does the genome change later, or so on and so on? So we're starting to do stuff on that. And a more big picture, actually, one thing that fascinates me that I haven't really found a way to answer yet is um is that actually when I talk to cat people, and I would be very interested in your opinion here, the general consensus is that it's possible to tame nearly every species of cat. And I mean, like, you know, tigers, lions, it depends on the behavior, but essentially people argue for most, not all of them, but for most of them, you can kind of be in a relationship with an adult where you can kind of live alongside it and so on, which is not the case in many canids, right? In canids.

Kristiina Wilson: 49:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.

Tom Gilbert: 49:57

Even today, wolves are nearly impossible to live alongside, right?

Kristiina Wilson: 50:01

Yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 50:02

And again, I mean, of course, there are exceptions, like the the uh the uh the leopard cat had to be crossed with uh with a regular cat to make the Bengal cat, for example, right? But in general, I have been told by people that it's easier to live in a kind of domestic situation with cats across all the species than in the canids, right? Um and to me this is quite interesting because it I always interested, why did we, how did we domesticate the the wolf into the dog? Given canids seem really, really difficult to live alongside. Are there any cat species that we couldn't if we tried hard enough tame? And actually going back in time, what about like what if we go beyond the the last common ancestor of, for example, the the regular house cat and the lion? Then you get into the lineages of like the saber cats, like the homotheriums, the smilodons, and so on. Would they have been tameable, right? So that's not to say they were tame, but like, is there something that genetically predisposes the cat lineage to be more easy to domesticate and tame than, for example, the dog lineage? I'd say very hard to test it, but I do like to think about this. You know, are there certain lineages that are just easier to do it or not? Are there exceptions and so on? And I have a few ideas how to work on this, but I haven't got completely as far as I'd like to get yet. But I I I'd like to speculate on this. Uh, I don't know if you ever read the famous, uh, the famous series Clan of the Cave Bear about.

Kristiina Wilson: 51:23

Yes, oh my, I love those books as a kid.

Tom Gilbert: 51:25

What does Isla do in Clan of the Cave Bear? She tames, I think, uh, either a smile of donor or homethurium, right?

Speaker 3: 51:30

Yeah, that's true.

Tom Gilbert: 51:32

Maybe it was possible, right? So uh I you know, this is my crazy wild thoughts. Like, could we ever and it does sound crazy, but I actually have some ideas of maybe there are ways one could get down to test that, and maybe it does involve actually the microbiome, because if fundamentally to make the initial behavioral change, you have to really change the microbiome. If certain lineages of animals are just resistant to a microbiome change, resistant to certain microbes that affect the behavior, maybe that makes them untamable, right? And maybe the ancestor of the dog was the weird exception. I mean, if you think about canids, uh, we maybe tamed the wolf 25,000 years ago, right? But we lived alongside very similar animals in Africa for a very long time, right? Uh Ethiopian wolves, African golden wolves, African hunting dogs, right? Side strap black jackals. You know, to be honest, it would probably have been useful to have some kind of tamed animal when you're a hunter-gatherer sleeping at night to basically either help the hunt or so. The fact we didn't, does that mean that maybe just because Ayala from Clan of the Cavebear came along 25,000 years ago, they had the human amazing development, or was it because basically the ancestors are untamable, right? And they just had to be in the right location. There are people who are starting to push the idea that we didn't tame dogs, and in fact, we didn't tame cats. They basically domesticate themselves using the human. I don't know if you you know about this stuff, right? But the idea that So, which I find very, very fascinating, taking the human initial agency out of it, right?

Kristiina Wilson: 52:56

Yes.

Tom Gilbert: 52:57

And so um, so anyway, it would be interesting, you know, there are I actually read a paper recently, China, about um archaeological evidence for, for example, essentially tame leopard cats, I think, uh going back um a long time before the current cat arrives basically down the Silk Road, not not that long ago or so on, right? And uh so one can start to wonder about how could it have been different? Were there options, you know, uh is it fundamentally possible to tame all cats but but not dogs and so on?

Kristiina Wilson: 53:26

I think it's I think that's a really interesting question. Personally, I'm so interested in the definition of tame, right? Like has to be tackled first, and then also the fact that cats and dogs exist socially so differently in the in the wild. This would be that would kind of be where my brain goes.

Tom Gilbert: 53:48

But this is why it's so interesting. There are many ways to explore it, right? Uh I mean, I I I I get that, but uh, you know, the funny thing is it seems to be, and this is another weird mystery. Our ancestors successfully tamed some kind of wolf into a dog. We actually don't know what it tamed. It's definitely not the wolves that you find today in Eurasia or in North America. There is a lost lineage of wolves that we know was around until about 10,000 years ago that vanished. We don't know where it happened, but we know it's an extinct lineage. What I do know is that it's extremely hard to tame wolves today, right?

Kristiina Wilson: 54:22

Oh yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 54:23

There are people who claim to be living with a tame wolf, and often they're actually hybrids. They're hybrids, yeah. And we know that the Czech, the Czech military tried it in the 50s with the Czech wolf dog, and they had to basically keep crossing palsations until it worked, right? So it's so to me this is fascinating, because you know, there would be people who would want to buy tame wolves if you could get them, right? They would be for sale, and they're not. I mean, that's a sad reality, right? So I'm pretty sure. I know there is a research group in Austria that have got what they claim to be tame wolves, but the funny thing is, when I talked to them about it, they're North American wolves. And I said, Why are you using North American wolves in Austria? And they said, Because it's not very easy to get the European wolves to beat tame. So, but but but this is my point. It it seems extremely hard to tame a wolf to a dog, and yet we somehow managed, right? And then it goes back to your question of why, what drove it. Was it that that the wolves themselves, because the megafauna were becoming rarer and rarer, started scavenging around humans. But what happens if you start scavenging around humans? You eat what the humans leave everywhere, which is food waste, and of course human feces, which is a great way to pick up microbes. So it starts making me think, well, maybe the microbes did get involved then, right? Um maybe. And sorry, back to your point about what is a definition of tame, really good question. I mean, one very naive way of looking at it is that uh maybe being able to live alongside the adults once they basically go through puberty, right? Because yes, I know people can live with wolf cubs, then they hit puberty, then it becomes impossible.

Kristiina Wilson: 55:49

Oh, is the problem, yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 55:51

And I think maybe this is when people have anecdotally told me that they think it's a lot easier with cats, is that apparently you can go past puberty with them and live alongside them in a way you can't with many of the canids, right? I mean, whether how much of that is because of abuse or so on or so on, but you know, Michael Jackson and his tiger, for example.

Kristiina Wilson: 56:10

Yeah.

Tom Gilbert: 56:11

But it's very hard to do that alongside a wolf or an Ethiopian wolf or an African hunting dog.

Kristiina Wilson: 56:16

It's true. I kind of were wonder about like where are you on the spectrum? I think that you could exist alongside them warily. And as long as they were supplied with enough food and you didn't move in a way that suggests that you're prey, right? Because there's always that problem. Just like what happened with Siegfried and Roy, right? When he fell down, and because that act that activated that that prey drive, you know, and and he'd known that that I guess it was a tiger or a lion, a tiger that attacked him. Yeah. It's because they're gonna always have that very quick prey drive that we run into this issue all the time with inter-cat aggression, that because they're predators and they're prey, that you can affect that drive so quickly, I would be very skeptical of thinking that you had domesticated any kind of a larger carnivore like larger cat that would freak me out.

Tom Gilbert: 57:15

So you're now shedding doubts on Clan of the Caverear.

Kristiina Wilson: 57:18

I know, I'm so sorry. And I I loved all of those books so much as a kid, but I mean, may I wish she was here to tell us how she did it.

Tom Gilbert: 57:27

Well maybe what maybe one day with the magic of uh of to either time travel or or genetics.

Kristiina Wilson: 57:33

Um Yeah. I mean, I wish I could do it. That's how I would go out being like, You're my friend. We have bears here, and I feel like one day I'm just gonna be like, hey bear, and it's gonna eat me, and I'll be like, that's fine. Maybe it was not baby.

Tom Gilbert: 57:44

I think either, right? Because it's just uh what's really going on? What's the alternate reality? Could one change it? Would it have been possible and so on? So one day.

Kristiina Wilson: 57:53

Yeah. I think it's a super interesting question. I I look forward to seeing how you answer it. Yeah. Seeing you live with all your domesticated tigers and leopards in your house.

Tom Gilbert: 58:04

Well, I I don't want them personally, to be honest. I am quite happy not having them. I'm happy with one dog and kids. Uh, but I uh just uh I I like to think about what could have been possible.

Kristiina Wilson: 58:12

Yeah. No, I get it. I get it. Well, thank you so much. This has been such an interesting discussion. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing all of your knowledge with all of us.

Tom Gilbert: 58:21

Thanks for your interest and your impressive knowledge of the paper, which is not always the case.

Speaker 2: 58:26

I got your questions, I was like, oh, she's read it, now I better read it again.

Kristiina Wilson: 58:33

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review wherever you listen. It super helps. For more information and to support our podcast, check out our website at hissantelpodcast.com. You can also find us on Instagram at HissnTel Podcast. Music provided by Cat Beats.