What affects us affects cats
Although the boundary between acting on instinct and acting on what you’ve been taught is often blurred, with respect to domestic cats, a study by Professor Kuo Zing Yang in the 1920s and the 1930s, published in The Journal of Comparative Psychology, showed: “that kittens can be made to kill a rat, to love …
Yes, a cat would attack a rabbit under the right circumstances and if the individual cat concerned likes to attack rabbits. It looks as if there are a lot of internet surfers (young people, I sense) who look after a cat and they want to adopt a rabbit (or vice versa) so they ask, …
Yes, domestic cats should be fed small meals often. This mimics free-living cats. Free-living cats are opportunistic predators of small prey such as mice. They typically have frequent small meals throughout the day. They spend a large part of the day searching for prey. A study, Bradshaw & Thorn, 1992, concluded that cats with …
It is in the DNA of domestic cats to go out at night to hunt, to be inquisitive, to do what evolution has programmed them to do. It is part of their being and their character. Domestic cats are crepuscular – hunt at dawn and dusk. However, domestic cats will be active at pretty …
It is very difficult to assess if domestic cat predation of birds makes a difference to population sizes of the various species in the long term. I’ve said it before that some scientists are frankly biased and their studies are unreliable partly because they do small scale studies and then scale up the figures …
There is a lot of talk and action in Australia about how to control domestic cats; to essentially restrict ownership and the movement of cats. The objective: to reduce the cat’s negative impact on wildlife numbers. Depite a lack of unequivocal evidence the Australian authorities firmly believe that both outside domestic cats and feral …
By Anonymous I blame myself. I’d cleaned out the hamster’s cage and I hadn’t noticed that the catch was not fastened properly. When I saw the cage again about 4 hours later there was no hamster in it. The cage was on its side and bits had fallen out of it. My cat is …
Domestic cats eat bugs because insects are one of the prey items that they hunt. They are on the agenda, part of a domestic cat’s list of creatures to hunt. Obviously insects are down the list of prey items to hunt but when prey is lean as it is in the home the cat …
