
Last night my cat brought in a mouse. And a lot of things happened which were negative to my life and one thing that was negative to his as it happens. I’ll list them here.
- He killed the mouse under my bed as he usually does. Mice sometimes scream before they die as they try and fight off the feline predator. I can hear it. This is upsetting to me. Humans are not meant to be able to hear mouse sounds but that does not apply when they scream in sheer terror.
- He crunches down on the warm body as he eats it under my bed. I can hear the bones being broken – upsetting again.
- About 5 minutes later he is sick. This happens sometimes but normally he is not sick.
- He jumps off the bed and fortunately was sick on the hard floor. If he had been sick on the bed, it would have been doubly bad. As it was, I had to get up at 2 am to clean up the vomit which was exclusively the remains of the mouse that he had eaten five minutes earlier.
- Having cleaned up, which took about ten minutes, I went back to bed. Fortunately, the vomit was easy to get at which made the clean up fairly straightforward. But it had to be cleaned up immediately as it stinks and the acid in it can stain hard floors.
- Having been active for ten minutes at 02:00 I could not get back to sleep.
- Got to sleep about 40 minutes later.
- Woke up later than usual as a result. This put me back in the day.
- If he had failed to kill the mouse and it had escaped it would have raced under some furniture where it would have hidden and died of starvation. More potential distress for me.
- If I am fortunate enough to catch an escaped mouse it is a lot of tricky work which I could well do without.
- When I catch a mouse that my cat has brought in alive and released, I put it back outside in the backyard and hope that it’ll escape. Sometimes my cat finds it again and kills it. More wasted time for me plus the distress of knowing a mouse has been killed.
- For an animal advocate the death of a mouse is slightly distressing. I am not saying I am crying my eyes out! Just that I don’t like it. It is another negative.
There you have a dozen negatives impacting my life just because I live with a top line predator who loves to hunt and is allowed outside to express his innate desires. Not all domestic cats are as keen as mine to hunt.
My cat is also a bigtime alpha male when it comes to defending his territory. He is a relatively small male cat with a monster amount of aggression when a cat comes onto his home range. But his reaction depends on which cat is trespassing!
However, ninety percent of the time he kicks them out even when they are minding their own business and doing nothing. Even when they are clearly submissive and not a threat. It doesn’t make any difference if they are males or females. He is violent towards them.
It is unpleasant to see but it is totally normal for a domestic cat particularly males. However, this desire to chase away cats invading a home range varies between cats. Some are less concerned. Mine is at the top end of the spectrum of aggression towards other cats.
I put it down to the fact that he is a rescued feral cat who spent the first seven weeks of his life with his feral mom. She raised him for those precious first seven weeks which has had a big impact on his character.
He can be very sweet though. A true domestic cat…until the wild cat withing emerges and..bang..it’s predation with a capital P.