I am happy with my caracals

The caracals are intuitive to tame (they are basically ocelots), useful for combat as they have more health/regen/damage than a dog and they make cute noises. Overall having a couple of them at your base will be an effective safeguard against anything the vanilla game can throw at you.

They don't cause performance issues unless a very large number of them is present in a small space, like with pretty much every other entity in the game.

Also they have a nice ear flick animation when idle.