AIUI, the dragons didn’t pick up any felines when they were raiding Earth, so the Empire remains (distressingly) cat-free.
Post-contact, how are the Eldrae likely to react to cats? Will they like them as pets? Will they consider them for uplift?
What will bandal and dar-bandal think of them?
Hate to crush a thread in its cradle, but canonically there are cats, or at least a species as related to cats as bandal are to dogs, given the split rather predating the emergence of Felis catus.
They’re descended from, effectively, a mixture of the European wildcat (F. silvestris) and the Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul), as noted here.
Huh, I wonder where I got that idea? I tried to search for “cats” and found nothing, and assumed I was correct…
To expand a bit more by way of compensation, due to its different ancestry - coming from much wilder and less social felines, noting that in particular the European wildcat was “deemed impossible to raise as a pet” - while it has become more friendly over the millennia, the Eliéran cat, or fírastal, as we should call it, would probably not make a great house pet, due to not being that domesticated.
They aren’t afraid of people, and are happy to hang around estates and villages and neighborhoods, kill vermin, and accept the occasional snack or petting as their rightful due, but they’re still very much The Cats Who Walk By Themselves, And All Places Are Alike To Them.
Well in that case, would they be interested in cats that are domesticated enough to keep as pets?
Maybe. There are always plenty of exotic pet fanciers around the place.
(I predict greatest success for the big fluffies, like the Maine Coon, Siberian, and Norwegian Forest.)