Cat breeds with dog. Hilarity ensures.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061117/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_brazil_dogcats_1

Discus.

This is just retarded. We’re full of that stuff here. Once a guy took a freak chicken to TV which had four legs, out of which only two were functional. It doesn’t take more than a couple of neurons to know the chicken had some genetic issues, but the owner kept saying that was due to the chicken being the result of either a dog or a cat (had to be a quadrupede animal) mating with another chicken.

Among other things, we had a goat with a malformation - think of a pinhead goat - which the owner said was born like that due to the crossing between a man and a female dog. We had a pig and human case too. More related to the case in the news, not long ago it was a cross between rabbits and cats.

The real novelty in this case is that it seems less like a case of animal theratology and more like a case of an animal adopting cubs of another species. As the article itself says.

Now, if you think the girl wants to make money out of the case, I think she doesn’t. She’ll get fifteen minutes of attention on TV, tops, but people never do things like asking for money for showing the freak animals. People make a fuss about such things because they actually believe these things. Talking them into common sense only causes them to strengthen their support for these ideas.

One of the things that makes me the saddest about this country is the level of education people have. They believe in the most retarded things, some being legends that date as back as first millenium. The daughter of my family’s maiden fiercely believes that all bats are rats that have undergone some kind of metamorphosis - and she goes to a really good school, but she’d rather believe in things she hears at the local church.

And she’s good in her biology. Other people are worse. In rural areas people believe that you can’t get cancer if you never talk about it; that you have to be a homossexual to get AIDS (guess why HIV is spreading so much), and that a child will naturally die if not baptismed within the first seven days of life. They also believe that children born outside marriage are prone to have animal characteristics like a tail or multiple niples, which are actually caused by mutations rather than by God’s anger.

So basically you’re saying people’s beliefs are like that of an 8 year old.

That sounds about right. Though I don’t think an 8-year old would see a cat with puppies and think that the cat is their mother. Even a child would prpbably assume it was adoption.

Watch TV, Setz. It educates.

Stupid, stupid people. May I suppose that faithful people can’t be homos, thus Christians don’t get AIDS?

hm…

As Ragnarok said, by about that age kids who are well educated won’t believe crap so easily. I’d lower it to 5-year-old beliefs.

Ren has it about right.

Dogs can’t breed with cats for a long list of reasons. There are very clear biological reproductive barriers that will make it impossible for anything to happen even if a dog did fuck the cat.

I think when I was about 4 years old I thought dogs and cats were the same species, and that dogs were the males and cats were the females.

I heard an argument against evolution that may apply here: “If you ask a child where dogs come from he’ll say ‘from dogs.’”

I honestly hope you don’t believe that.

Evolution doesn’t work that way. The evolutionary changes that occur are so subtle that it would be extremely difficult to check them in the time of a single human generation. However, evidence of evolution can be seen easily just by looking at the world around us (or at the Galapagos Islands which Darwin himself explored). If you are going to refuse to “believe” in the hard evidence of evolution (also known as facts), then I sincerely have little hope for you.

Oh, Setz: dogs and cats cannot mate. Even the simple problem of difference of genetalia would make it extremly difficult and/or undesireable for dogs and cats to mate.

Just because I’m an English major doesn’t mean I buy into the relativistic “postmodern” pap smear that is the modern literary scholar’s wet dream.

lol People carrying on a retarded discussion with such seriousness.

( Im predicting a thought of yours being something as more of a rebuttle than a realization that this is, in fact, a retarded discussion…Plus, ‘discuss’ is vauge and i dont care what the point of the moment is. Fact is, I’m hating you all for being so dumb.)

Look! Its a pot! Its calling a kettle black!

This, instead of being a misconstrued situation like the others, is fully impossible. Its plain old crap.

Simmer, if you don’t like the thread, don’t post comments like this. They’re trolling and off topic spam. I’ll include your similar post in the superlions thread under this. You’ve been warned.

You too? I used to think that exact thing, go figure.

“Anything” other than the cat totally clawing the dog to pieces, that is.

You know, I don’t know where many of you are getting the idea that I believe any of this either.

Oh no, there are a lot of things. Its not just the behavioral thing, its not just mechanical difficulties in the act itself. Its also on the molecular side when the sperm undergoes specific enzymatic reactions before fertilizing the egg and once the egg is fertilized, which it isn’t but let’s assume it is, then you have chromosomal incompatibilities that will make it impossible for proper mitoses to happen, in addition to differences in how a lot of things like the different epigenetics / methylation patterns (sets up the order the genes are going to be activated), not to mention the activated genes might not even be completely compatible.

Yes, yes, I know all that (in more laymanly terms). I just wanted to chime in and remind people that ever cat I, at least, have ever met, would claw the balls right off any offending dog. Lovely creatures.