oh, if you felt like sharing i'd love to hear you out about omegaverse being more feline?
omg yes okay so i probably should have said omegas are more cat than dog, because neither cats NOR dogs rut. rut is mostly limited to ungulates [sheep, deer, etc and also elephants? fascinating.] so alpha/rut biology is just. a whole other thing, and quite frankly rut should involve a lot more piss than it typically does [which is fine by me, not one of my kinks personally, but if we're being biologically accurate here...] but imo it's silly to have omegas lose control and not alphas. let the boys have some biologically-mandated loss of control and sense of self fun too! ANYWAY as far as the "more cat than dog" part goes:
neither canines nor felines menstruate, but dogs do experience "periods" i.e. bloody discharge during their heats; it's not the shed of the uterine lining, so it doesn't have accompanying cramps [from what i can find, anyway] but if part of the appeal is "my favorite guy doesn't have to deal with the mess of periods and pads and tampons and such," then it's feline biology you want, not canine.
hard, physically-affecting neck bites during sex? not a dog thing. male dogs will SOMETIMES bite the back of a female's neck, but it's more for stability than to keep the female still. cats, male and female, young and old, can be scruffed to make them easier to handle, and that's the express purpose of the neck bite in feline mating. if you're eroticizing the bite as a physical sensation that makes your omega character more receptive/aroused then that's, you guessed it! feline biology, not canine.
cats display lordosis behavior prior to sex whereas dogs mostly just tail-flag, so presenting [as a position like "for mounting," not as during-puberty, why did we pick the same word for two aspects of the verse] is also more cat than dog, though this one is perhaps. less compelling. given the existence of "doggystyle" as a concept.
dogs have the better sense of smell on paper, but there's significant evidence that cats communicate through scent more effectively than dogs. a character being able to sense someone's emotions changing through the scent they're giving off is more information-dense than how i've seen dog scent-marking described, which is mostly for marking territory or signalling mating readiness, not so much communicating emotion.
cats also tend to have scent glands in more of the places that characters in omegaverse fics do; again, dogs do scent-mark, and have face and paw glands, but the majority of discussion of canine scent marking focuses on anal gland expression. meanwhile bunting is a well-known behavior in cats, and that's using the scent glands on their chins and cheeks. interestingly, neither dogs nor cats have carpal [wrist] glands, which next to the neck and/or jaw is the most frequent place i see omegaverse fics place scent glands; that's another ungulate thing and only in some species of deer and lemurs, apparently? also fascinating.
this is anecdotal and admittedly i've had more cats than dogs in my life, though all my dogs have been female, but in my experience dogs' behavior in heat isn't significantly different from dogs' behavior not in heat? meanwhile every. single. female cat. i've ever had. is SO FUCKING ANNOYING during heat, just constantly screaming "WISH SOMEONE WOULD COME FUCK ME RIGHT NOW. LIKE RIGHT NOW." for a week and a half. they genuinely turn into a different animal, their personality is muted or gone, they just want sum fuk and they want it NOW. much more similar to your typical omega-in-heat fic behavior imo.
i'm not unaware that a lot of my opinions here may in fact be because i have more familiarity with cat behavior and biology than with dog behavior and biology, so ymmv, as ever. there's some arguments to be made about the pack stuff being more canine, but considering the research on wolf packs and the concept of alpha/beta/omega wolves not really being a thing in the wild, pack-bond stuff is more about vibes than biology imo. so really the only thing that's EXCLUSIVELY canine to me about omegaverse is alphas having knots/mating ties, and... i mean, barbed cat peens and the attendant follicular stimulation are just nooot as appealing. i shan't get into why the former is more appealing.
