A mouse’s scrubbed and cleaned gallbladder after my cat ate the animal

by Michael Broad · May 18, 2021

Because of eons of gradually refining evolution, the domestic cat is at the pinnacle of her predatory skills. She is one of the world’s finest predators, top of their food chain, highly efficient and devastating. Domestic cats vary in their eagerness to hunt and mine is at the top end of the spectrum in terms of eagerness. He hunts with great skill and when he brings his mouse back to my home, he might growl at me to tell me to stay away. It is his animal to consume and nobody will get in the way of that.

Is this all that is left of a mouse when your cat eats one? Photo: MikeB

THERE ARE PAGES ON BIRD PREDATION BY CATS AT THE BASE OF THE PAGE.

He takes it to his den either under my bed or in the hallway on a mat. You can see what is left on the mat in the photograph above. It is a scrubbed and cleaned gallbladder, I believe. I believe that this mouse organ must be the gallbladder because it contains bile and bile is quite bitter or very bitter. Remarkably, sometimes he eats it as well and there is absolutely nothing left including no blood.

Sometimes he does leave blood but on other occasions you would not know that he has consumed a mouse in 60 seconds starting with the head and ending with the tail. You hear two things when he consumes a mouse. The first is the dying desperate scream of the mouse. Normally mouse sounds are almost inaudible because of the high frequency but at that devastating moment the scream is very noticeable from quite a distance. The mouse is screaming at the top of his lungs and it hurts, it hurts so bad.

The second thing you hear is the crunching of the skull of the mouse as it is crushed in my cat’s powerful jaws. When he’s finished, he eats some commercially prepared dried food or whatever else is available because he has not had enough. And then he drinks some water. It’s remarkable that he can go from totally raw almost living food to the most artificial type of pet food you can buy, within seconds.

This is testament to their adaptability to living with people i.e. their evolution during domestication over 10,000 years, rather than the evolution of the precursor to the domestic cat. I wish he didn’t kill mice. It’s not the mess and it’s not chasing mice around the home to capture them to release them even if they are injured. I’m wasting my time but I have to do it. It is the death of a sentient animal which hurts me. It makes you wonder whether people can live with such a predator. Is it feasible for people to live with a top of the tree predator? Clearly it is but the weakness in the relationship is this predation, this cruel killing.

This is one reason why domestic cats are kept inside full-time in many parts of America and in the UK. It means that they cannot express those innate and wonderful desires to kill, and that being the case the cat’s guardian has to find substitutes to entertain their cat and rekindle their mojo. That can only be achieved through well-rehearsed play. It is something that cat owners don’t do enough of which is why cats can get bored which in turn is why they can become slightly obese or worse. It’s a problem.

BIRD PREDATION BY CATS: