Wildcats are improbable candidates for domestication. Like all felids [cats], wildcats are obligate carnivores, meaning they have a limited metabolic ability to digest anything except proteins. Wildcats live a solitary existence and defend exclusive territories, making them more attached to places than to people. Furthermore, cats do not perform directed tasks and their actual utility is debatable; even as mousers, in this latter role, terrier dogs and ferrets are preferable. Accordingly, there is little reason to believe an early agricultural community would have sought out and selected the wildcat as a house pet. Rather, the best inference is that wildcats exploiting human environments were simply tolerated by people and, over time and space, they gradually diverged from their "wild" relatives.