The food chain--a cat's paradise

I've been thinking recently about "the food chain."

Humans like to think they are on the "top" of the food chain. I submit this is true despite recent efforts to make humanity "one species among many." Just as often as someone defends the dignity of man, based on reason or freedom or the ability to drive a car 500 laps in a circle and not usually crash, there is someone at least thinking that we're the best by the simple fact that we are more likely to eat than be eaten.

The food chain is supposed to look like this.
Plants.

We make them into bread, but we also intentionally feed them to other animals that we want to eat.

Then, we combine the two and eat them.

Herbivore + carnivore = omnivore.
Sure, some people decide to forgo eating meat, but that only proves the point--what other species consciously chooses not to eat a key part of its natural diet. Only the best, obviously.

Now, there are these folks--the top predators.

We don't normally eat them, and in some time periods, some situations, and some countries, we have real trouble with them eating us.
Still, we've by and large reached the point where, if we wanted to wipe them out, we could. And in fact we are to a significant extent doing that, by a combination of people who want to (because they face real threats from these predators) and people who don't mean to, but whose choices shrink habitat or otherwise impede their ecological necessities.

And you may have heard on the news, some of us still like to kill them just to show off.

But I haven't been thinking about this problem just because of that news. I've been thinking about it because my daughter's leg was looking like this:

(I couldn't put a real picture of bites--too gross).

Now, I know, mosquitoes don't "eat" humans whole.
But:
1) They kill a lot of people--an estimated 1 million people worldwide per year.
2) We could eradicate them, but only with really nasty pesticides that would harm us and a lot of other things.
3) We kill a lot of them when they bite us, but--trust me on this--there are always more!

But that doesn't mean mosquitoes--even the "Asian tiger" mosquitoes (interesting name) we seem to have in my area--are the top of the food chains.

 (Look out mosquito, the purple martin is coming for you).

And what eats birds? Well, mostly other birds, but that's not where I'm going with this.

The domesticated cat is the top of the food chain. Because they have allied with us, these cats benefit from all of the "we-kill-what-we-want-to" advantages that humans have. But they also stand as the things that eat the things that eat us.

This raises the question--did we domesticate cats, or did cats domesticate us? Did cats get together when we were getting good at teaming up on large predators and say, "The only way to conquer them is to make them our slaves"?

Now, domesticated cats are too small to actually attack us--this was the compromise they had to accept in order to carry out their plan and enjoy the population growth and protection that they've gotten as "pets." They could have tried to stay big and urge one another to act nice and domesticated, but as we all know, nobody can hold a cat to anything. Giving up their size advantage was the only option.

But, cat lovers, raise your hand if you think your beloved feline would hesitate to eat you if you accidentally shrunk-rayed yourself to mouse size?

You may protest that cats don't eat that many mosquito-eating birds. But that's not the point. They don't have to, because we serve their food up on a platter.

 Maybe we do this, not only out of interspecies-friendship, but to acknowledge the true heads of the food chain, who "graciously" deign to allow us to serve them.