Japanese People and Cats(2) It was seven million years ago that cats appeared on this planet. But they've only been domesticated for ten thousand years. They were domesticated by the Egyptians. At that time, the Egyptians began to farm earnestly using the flooding of the Nile River, but they were troubled by rats that gnawed at the crops. That is why cats were domesticated. Cats were highly revered in Egypt. Ancient Egyptian dynasties strictly prohibited cats from being taken abroad. But Phoenician merchants who were coming in and out of Egypt's ports sneaked the cat away. It was the same in any country worried about rats. Cats spread to Mediterranean beaches such as Greece and Rome, gradually expanding their territory. They came to China in the second century BC and to Japan with Buddhism around the sixth century. In general, cats are neither more devoted to people than dogs, nor are they more amiable. Compared to dogs, which were domesticated about 30,000 years ago, cats still retain many wild instincts because their history of domestication is short. So dogs were more popular than cats everywhere. In the late 1990s, when raising pets became popular, dogs outnumbered cats significantly. Then, in 2007, news broke that a cat named Tama was inaugurated as the honorary manager at a station in a rural village on the verge of demolition. This was a decisive reason for the explosive increase in the number of people raising cats. Tama died of acute renal failure in 2015 after serving as a stationmaster with great love for eight years. At this time, there were 3,000 mourners in memory of Tama. But Tama was just a trigger, and there was already a social atmosphere in which the Japanese preferred cats to dogs. The reasons for the preference for cats in Japan are as follows. The first cause is aging. As of 2022, Japan has 20 million seniors aged 75 and over, comprising 15% of the population. There are 12 million people over the age of 80, which is 10 percent. To keep a do