What affects us affects cats
In general, domestic cat need to express predatory behaviour. In other words they need to hunt to feel normal. A sizeable chunk, perhaps 60% of a cat’s life would be removed from them if they had no opportunity to express predatory behaviour. As there are many domestic cats living full-time inside their home there …
The question in the title might, at first instance, look completely normal. Domestic cats hunt in order to feed themselves, surely? But domestic cats don’t need to hunt to eat. In nearly all homes, they are provided with commercial cat food. They have all the niceties of being in a good home that the …
Yes, leopards eat monkeys but it depends on where the leopard is living. They have an enormous distribution, the largest of all the wild cat species. In “some forested areas leopards take a surprisingly large number of monkeys”1. This should not surprise us because leopards catch prey opportunistically, killing vulnerable animals wherever they are …
Yes, well fed cats do hunt because it is an inherited, instinctive trait but a domestic cat may not kill prey quite so often nor eat prey as consistently if they are well fed on high quality food. Being well fed may contribute to a decreased need to hunt. Well fed – still hunt …
Domestic cats are already adapting to modern human living but what about the long term future, the 22nd and 23rd centuries? Cats are more sociable than they were when first domesticated some 9,500 to perhaps even 14,500 years ago. However, they are a cat’s whisker away from their wild cat ancestor in terms of …
Yes, feral cats do eat snakes, even venomous species, but it depends where the feral cat lives as this determines whether there are snakes to be eaten. Certainly in Australia there are plenty of snakes, some of which are venomous. As reported by phys.org, a study from Murdoch University in Australia revealed the prey …
Tigers do kill animals that are considerably larger than themselves. However, there are records of tigers killed by gaur and water buffalo after a massive struggle from both. W.R. Foran in his book of 1933 “Kill or be killed’ writes about a fight between a tiger and a water buffalo cow. She bowled him …
Yes, domestic cats can and sometimes do kill rabbits. A rabbit falls under the classification of lagomorph (hares, rabbits and pikas). Predation by domestic cats on lagomorphs is more commonplace on the young of the species. The secondary question, therefore, is whether domestic cats kill rabbits of the same size as the cat. The …
