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Assessment of cats shows they eat more types o creatures than previously thought
- pixl97 3y agoGrowing up on a farm with cats, I always thought the general rule for them was, if it moves, and it's smaller than them, it dies.
- fishtacos 3y agoDepends on how domesticated they are. My current ones are overinsured because the previous one died of being a bit too adventurous against cars. It's a fine line when it comes to pet independence.
- bigbillheck 3y agoCars do move but even the smallest of them is much larger than a very large housecat.
- fishtacos 3y agoYes, momentum from a large metal object tends to run over squishy bags of meat, not the other way around.
- gwern 3y agoI think the real rule for cats is, 'if your mother brought you it, then you hunt and eat it; if you feel sick in the hours after eating it, you stop eating it'. If you think about it, cats are such generalist obligate-carnivore predators, across such diverse changing environments, that they can't possibly have hardwired prey preferences. (In fact, Kuo in some interesting experiments way back in the 1930s showed cats won't even hunt mice that they are brought up with - they have to be shown hunting & killing mice before they will kill mice, and even then, that is only as long as that mouse was not their 'mother': https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/1930-kuo.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/1930-kuo.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/1938-kuo.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/1938-kuo.pdf) But if you adopt a simple 'imitate your mother' rule (which is what kittens seem to do during their period of plasticity), then you automatically adapt to local prey in an efficient manner by vertical cultural transmission. (This has some drawbacks, however. Humans don't tend to feed kittens varied food, so their dietary preferences become highly restricted; and it is widely stated, although I couldn't find any good research empirically establishing this, that the reason elderly cats often go 'off their feed' or refuse to eat anything but a single specific brand of cat food which have been discontinued, is these learning mechanisms backfiring. If you learn as a kitten to eat only 1 brand of cat food, and then as an old adult you eat it and then get sick for unrelated reasons...)
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThey may kill it but not necessarily eat it.
- bestouff 3y agoCats kill even more creatures than what they eat.
- promiseofbeans 3y ago@dang title typo
- positus 3y agoIt's more fun this way though :c
- alekseiprokopev 3y agoMy cat once tried to hunt for a cow.
- pharrington 3y agoMore than "previously thought"??? Have aliens actually arrived on Earth, but we just haven't seen any because cats already ate them all?
- hydrok9 3y agofor a second I thought this had something to do with type A personalities
- deadbabe 3y agoThe typo in the title made me believe that somehow cats could smell Type O blood and preferred to eat those creatures specifically, which makes me wonder, do some animals actually have a preference for eating certain blood types?
- winwang 3y agoPresumably, vampires?
- eyelidlessness 3y agoMosquitoes apparently do prefer Type O blood.
- deadbabe 3y agoBut why?
- throwaway5357 3y agoWe had a cat that used to eat cockroaches, flies, muskmelons, anything that's not sour or spicy, it would eat. Even dogs are picky eaters, the cat wasn't.
- mrmincent 3y agoMy Dad lives in a small Australian country town, catches something like 50-70 cats in cat traps in his house and back yard each year and offloads them to the local pound. I can’t understand how cat owners are allowed to let their animals run all over town at all hours of the day and night. They cause so much damage to the native animals, wiping out frog and bird populations.