Mary Mouw, age 14, of Sioux Center, Iowa, for her question:

Which animal was domesticated first?

This question tends to trigger heated disputes between the cat lovers and the dog lovers. Persons able to expand their affections to include both these popular pets tend to take a more unbiased view. They can face the fact that both dogs and cats were domesticated between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago and that there is no honest evidence to prove which was adopted first. Possibly cats became partially domesticated in early settled communities while at the same time wild dogs were being partially tamed by people who were still at the hunting or herding stage of their culture.

However, all of us tend to limit this problem to our domestic pets. It is far more likely that our ancestors first domesticated herds of cattle. This no doubt occurred much earlier, at a time when primitive hunting communities learned to reduce their chores by controlling the migrations of wild game animals. The hunters became herdsmen of partially domesticated cattle long before cats and dogs became part of the human family