I saw a video by Casual Geographic recently where he hit on the same thing. A lot of things about cats that differ from domesticated dogs and other animals are actually pretty advantageous to us.

• They don't (usually) share their kills with us. If your cat is out there keeping the rodent population down, it's kind of nice that they keep that to themselves and don't share a bunch of useless, gross, carcasses with you.

• They hunt independently. Kind of goes with the above, but again it's nice that they just have that on lock down and don't need you to be involved in them doing their jobs.

• The reason we have them and not something like snakes is because first, they're not generally a threat to us, and also they are warm blooded and need to eat more than a cold blooded animal, which is also a benefit when keeping pest animals in check.

Basically we were like "hey these things are hungry little murder machines that are basically indifferent to us - let's keep them around."