Such tales may have originated from people trying to make sense of their environment and the strange animals that occasionally traveled through it before genetics became a scientific field. The modern offenders might be aiming for some money and notoriety. Additionally, some people just won’t accept the truth, according to Hartwell, who receives emails from “people who just don’t like rational explanations.”
Animal scams and hoaxes are all too common and frequently border on the fantastic, but we fall for them. Examples include tales of impossible hybrids or births, or of naive would-be pet owners being tricked into keeping an unfriendly or dangerous species. It’s as though the natural world weren’t already fascinating enough.
To put it very simply, a hybrid is a crossbreeding offspring. And they do exist; the mating relationship between a horse and a donkey produces mules, for example. However, it is scientifically impossible to create genetically distinct animal hybrids, such as dogs and cats, or for one species to give birth to an entirely different one. That has not stopped people from hoping.
And indeed, the stories still surface. Cats giving birth to dogs in Brazil and China have been reported in recent years. Tales of mistaken identities are also popular. In 2013, a popular story claimed a would-be poodle owner bought a puppy from an Argentine market, only to find that the animal was a ferret doped up on steroids and fluffed to look like a poodle. The story sounds improbable and most likely is; the photograph that circulated with the story is of an actual animal called an Angora ferret. In 2018, a family in China reported that the pet it had believed for two years to be a Tibetan mastiff was actually an endangered Asiatic black bear.
Every April Fools Day, fabulous stories of nonexistent animals make the rounds: In 1984 the Orlando Sentinel chronicled the “mock walrus,” a tiny version of the enormous marine mammal. (The accompanying photo was of a naked mole rat.) In 2009 Catster trumpeted that Cornell University’s School of Veterinary Medicine had created a cat-dog hybrid.
Differences in Mating Behavior
Due to their dissimilar reproductive systems and mating behaviors, cats and dogs rarely express interest in mating.
It’s also crucial to remember that dogs and cats exhibit different mating rituals and signals. Cats and dogs do not recognize each other’s mating signals. They also will go into heat at different times. Animals communicate with one another through mating signals, which they use to determine when it is time to mate. If two species follow distinct mating patterns, the signals will not be understood by one another. Dogs and cats do not exhibit the same level of interest in mating. Cats’ and dogs’ reproductive systems are very different too. For instance, a cat’s egg cannot be fertilized by a dog’s sperm (or vice versa)
Even dietary variations exist that would make it impossible for any potential progeny to survive. Despite the fact that dogs and cats cannot reproduce due to genetic differences, even if it were possible, the progeny would not be able to survive due to the extreme differences in the diets and digestive systems of the two species.
Cats are obligate carnivores. This indicates that in order for them to survive, they must eat meat. On the other hand, dogs are known as omnivores. This indicates that they need to eat both meat and plants. Since dogs’ and cats’ digestive systems are different and they need different kinds and amounts of nutrients to survive and be healthy, the two cannot have children because their dietary requirements are irreconcilable.
Why Can’t Cats and Dogs Mate?
Even if cats and dogs made an effort to mate, they would not be able to have healthy children.
Dogs and cats do not have enough DNA in common to allow them to mate. These are two distinct species of animals that hardly ever even try to mate. Some hybrid species, like lions and tigers (ligers), horses and donkeys (mules), share enough DNA with each other to produce hybrid offspring.
Because the parents’ DNA is sufficiently similar to each other, it is possible for a hybrid offspring to be born out of one of these kinds of pairings. There is sufficient complementary DNA shared by the parents, as well as sufficient base pair sequence identity. This allows new DNA to be formed. Stated differently, their similarity in DNA was sufficient for them to have children.
In order to have children, cats and dogs do not have enough DNA in common. They won’t be able to mate successfully, to start with. However, because their DNAs are so dissimilar, even if they did, they could not have children.
Dogs have 78 chromosomes (39 pairs), compared to 38 chromosomes in cats (19 pairs). Similar species that can give birth to hybrid offspring will share similar DNA, which means they will have an equal number of chromosome pairs, as we previously discussed. It is not possible for cats and dogs to have children because they do not share the same number of chromosome pairs.
FAQ
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