Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
I’ve been up to London to visit the Queen.
Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.
-Nursery rhyme
I came across a cartoon a few years ago, where this guy was feeding his mutt and in the dog’s thought bubble was that his master is always so kind and addressing his every need and want and that the man must be some kind of god.
The next frame was the fellow now feeding his feline, with the thinking the same except that it was himself that must a god! For those that cater to them, (like us) I’m sure that’s not too far off the mark!
So if Fluffy figures his human is here for his every whim, then surely he must think that nature is here for his own personal playground for the palate – a veritable feline feast where anything that moves is a munchie.
Let’s face it folks, your cat may be cuddly and cute, but that lounge lizard on your lap is really a killer kitty!
Whiskers and Boots can sure do a lot of harm in a hurry around you and your neighborhood – devouring birds, mice, moles, voles, bugs, butterflies, bunnies, frogs, snakes, squirrels, chipmunks and all else in between. It’s impressive (in a morbid sort of way) to watch a cat in action when its’ zoned in on a target.
The approach is almost imperceptible, the eyes unblinking and tail ever so slightly twitching until the little wiggle before the launch. I’ve seen one catch a bird in mid-flight by leaping at it from a distance of 10 feet, pinning it against a fence then trotting away with the doomed thing still flapping away in its mouth.
They can also have a warped sense of fun with their victims by sometimes indulging in a little playtime first, like pouncing or flipping them into the air a few times or simply chewing on them here and there before the fatal bite.
One of my childhood memories was of our family cat Rudy using a big curled up wolf spider as a soccer ball on the dining room floor for a few minutes until he finally decided to dine on it. I don’t think any of us will ever forget those gross crunching sounds and the long hairy legs sticking out of his mouth before it went down the hatch- eeeyuck!
Paul Gallico, author of the book Honourable Cat, defends them by saying: “It all boils down rather to who eats whom. Since the bird lover will sit down to a tasty dish of partridge, quail or pheasant while his heart bleeds for the sparrow or the robin, the situation is likely to become confused.
The cat is a hunter for food and the instinct has never been bred out of it. Games with an injured prey have nothing to do with the will to cause it pain or suffering.
There are two main objectives; to keep the hunting muscles and speed and timing sharp, or to bring a no longer dangerous specimen to its kittens for similar exercises. Almost all of a cat’s “play” is not play at all, but practice. There are the hunter and the hunted and let the hunted beware in the inexorable hierarchy of nature. The cat stalking the field mouse in the meadow should not forget the eagle hovering in the sky.”
True enough, but they can still wreak havoc where they hang out. We had some family members stay on the property for a year a while back, and in short order their two uncontrolled cats had wiped out everything around here, leaving body bits and feathers all over the place.
I was choked because ours is restricted to a couple of hours of ‘run-around time’ in the late evening and it took years for the critters to re-establish themselves again.
There was a story about a fellow in New Zealand who wanted to rid the country of cats due to their threat to native bird species, but defenders argued that it was a two-sided coin because they said that cats actually helped the birds by reducing the population of rodents, which sometimes fed on bird eggs.
That may be so, but the guy had a point. Statistically, cats kill as many as four billion birds, along with up to 21 billion other mammals in the U.S. each year alone, which is a lot of carnage.
We can’t knock them for what just comes naturally, but we can do our part as owners when it comes to damage control.
Keep them indoors when the birds are active during the day and locate your birdbaths and feeders out in the open, so there is no sneaking up on them. Your feline friend might think that having a field day of stalking birds and other critters is the cat’s meow. However, they get their nine lives but everything else only gets one.
See Gaiagardening.ca for more information and previous columns.
