Alberta Stars

Predatory Behavior of Cats

Domestic cats have enough sense to dial down their predatory instincts in exchange for canned cat food and a safe place to sleep. They’ll cavort and mince around just enough to entertain their owners, knowing that these behaviors are their meal tickets. But their instincts are hard-wired, as is evidenced by the speed with which they can turn wild if abandoned. Try as they may to hide them, their predatory instincts will out, often to the horror of their owners.

People who view cats “playing with” a dead or dying bird or mouse have trouble reconciling that image with the Disney cuteness of kittens playing with soft white toilet rolls, or singing along sweetly with the Meow Meow song. Cat owners often anthropomorphize their cats, attributing human emotions to them. Because their cats don’t crave approval as dogs do, people say cats are aloof. Because cats won’t always come when called, people say they’re independent and that they’re acting superior. But cats don’t have human emotions. They’re much closer to their animal instincts than their owners like to think. When they “play with” their prey, they’re going on a hard wired instinct which dictates, “Stun it, so that you can kill it.’ A mouse or bird which has been used for batting practice is too stunned to resist its captor’s final death blow

When you watch a National Geographic special about the survival habits of wild cats, it’s impossible to miss the similarities between the behavior of the feline on the screen and that of the feline in your living room. In the wild, mother cats teach kittens that hunting yields food. She brings them prey which only needs to have its neck broken before it can be eaten. The crucial skill which the wild kittens must learn is that of the lethal “nape bite”. This coup de grace severs the spinal cord and kills the prey, unless the prey is too big. Larger prey is asphyxiated by having the cat’s mouth clamped on its throat. If wild kittens don’t master these skills, their chance of starving to death increases greatly. This is the skill which initially caused man to domesticate cats, as there’s no better pest control expert than a hungry cat confronted with a mouse.