Catwatching (8 page)

An experienced, full-time hunter would not react in this way, but a pampered pet cat, being a little rusty on the techniques of a quick kill, may well prefer this safer option.

Immediately after the kill, a cat goes through the strange little routine of 'taking a walk'. Unless it is starving, it paces up and down for a while, as if feeling the need to release the tension of the huntand-kill sequence. Only then does it settle down to eating the prey.

This pause may be important for the cat's digestion, giving its system a chance to calm down after the adrenalin-excitement of the moments that have just passed. During this pause a prey that has been feigning death may try to escape and, on very rare occasions, succeeds in doing so before the cat can return to the hunting mood again.

When the cat finally approaches its prey to eat it, there is the problem of how to prepare it for easy swallowing. Small rodents cause no difficulties. They are simply eaten head first and the skins, if swallowed, are regurgitated later. Some cats separate out the gallbladder and intestines and avoid eating them, but others are too hungry to care and gobble down the entire animal without any fuss.

Birds are another matter because of their feathers, but even here the smaller species are eaten in their entirety, with the exception of tail and wing feathers. Birds the size of thrushes and blackbirds are plucked a little before eating, but then the cat impatiently starts its meal.

After a while it breaks off to remove a few more feathers, before eating further. It repeats this a number of times as the feeding proceeds.

Bigger birds, however, demand more systematic plucking, and if a cat is successful at killing a pigeon or something larger, it must strip away the feathers before it begins to eat.

To pluck a pigeon, a cat must first hold down the body of the bird with its front feet, seize a clump of feathers between its teeth, pull its jaw-clamped head upwards with some force, and then finally open its mouth and shake its head vigorously from side to side to remove any clinging plumage. As it shakes its head it spits hard and makes special licking-out movements with its tongue, trying to clear its mouth of stubbornly attached feathers. It may pause from time to time to lick its flank fur. This last action puts grooming into reverse.

Normally the tongue cleans the fur, but here the fur cleans the tongue.

Any last remnants are removed and then the next plucking action can take place.

The urge to pluck feathers from a large bird appears to be inborn. I once presented a dead pigeon to a wild cat living in a zoo cage where it had always been given chunks of meat as its regular diet. The cat became so excited at seeing a fully feathered bird that it started an ecstatic plucking session that went on and on until the whole body of the bird was completely naked. Instead of settling down to eat it, the cat then turned its attention to the grass on which it was sitting and began plucking that. Time and again it tugged out tufts of grass from the turf and shook them away with the characteristic bird-plucking movements until, eventually, having exhausted its long-frustrated urge to prepare its food, the cat finally bit into the flesh of the pigeon and began its meal. Clearly, plucking has its own motivation and can be frustrated by captivity, just like other, more obvious drives.

The strangest feature of feather-plucking is that Old World Cats perform it differently from New World Cats. All species from the first area perform a zigzag tugging movement leading to the full shake of the head, while those from the Americas tug the feathers out in a long vertical movement, straight up, and only then perform the sideways shake. It appears that, despite superficial similarities between the small cats from the two sides of the Atlantic, they are in reality two quite distinct groups.

Before the cat became elevated to the level of a companion and pet for friendly humans, the contract between man and cat was based on the animal's ability to destroy pests. From the time mankind first started to keep grain in storage, the cat had a role to play and carried out its side of the bargain with great success. Not so long ago it was thought that the best way to get farm cats to kill rats and other rodent pests was to keep the feline hunters as hungry as possible.

This seemed obvious enough, but it was wrong. Hungry farm cats spread out over a huge hunting territory in search of food and killed fewer of the pests inside the farm. Cats that were fed by the farmer stayed nearer home and their tally of farm pests was much higher. The fact that they had been fed already and were not particularly hungry made no difference to the number of prey they killed each day, because the urge to hunt is independent of the urge to eat. Cats hunt for the sake of hunting. Once farmers realized this they were able to keep their cats close by the farm and reduce the damage done to their stores by rodent pests. A small group of farm cats, well looked after, could prevent any increase in the rodent population, providing a major infestation had not been allowed to develop before their arrival.

According to one authority, the champion mouser on record was a male tabby living in a Lancashire factory where, over a very long lifespan of twenty-three years, he killed more than 22,000 mice. This is nearly three a day, which seems a reasonable daily diet for a domestic cat, allowing for some supplements from human friends, but it is far exceeded by the world's champion ratter. That honour goes to a female tabby which earned her keep at the late lamented White City Stadium.

Over a period of only six years she caught no fewer than 12,480 rats, which works out at a daily average of five to six. This is a formidable achievement and it is easy to see why the ancient Egyptians went to the trouble of domesticating cats and why the act of killing one was punishable by death.

They do this because they consider their owners such hopeless hunters.

Although usually they look upon humans as pseudo-parents, on these occasions they view them as their family – in other words, their kittens. If kittens do not know how to catch and eat mice and small birds, then the cat must demonstrate to them. This is why the cats that most commonly bring home prey and offer such gifts to their owners are neutered females. They are unable to perform this action for their own litters, so they redirect it towards human companions.

The humans honoured in this way frequently recoil in horror or anger, especially if the small rodent or bird is still half-alive and struggling. The cat is totally nonplussed by this extraordinary response. If it is scolded for its generous act, it once again finds its human friends incomprehensible. The correct reaction would be to praise the cat for its maternal generosity, take the prey from it with many compliments and strokings and then quietly dispose of it.

Under natural conditions a cat which has a litter of kittens introduces them to prey animals little by little. When they are about seven weeks old, instead of killing and eating her prey where she catches it, she kills it and then brings it back to where the kittens are kept. There she proceeds to eat it while they watch. The next phase involves bringing the dead prey back and playing with it before consuming it, so that the kittens can see her beating it with her claws and grabbing it.

The third phase involves leaving the prey to be eaten by the kittens themselves. But she is still not prepared to risk bringing a live or even a half-dead prey to the kittens, because it could easily bite them or attack them if they are unwary. Only when they are a little older will she do this, and then she herself will make the kill in front of the kittens. They watch and learn. Eventually they will accompany her on the hunt and try killing for themselves.

Most cat-owners have observed the way in which, once in a while, their pet goes up to a long grass stem in the garden and starts to chew and bite at it. Cats living in apartments where there are no gardens in which to roam have been known to cause considerable damage to house plants in desperate attempts to find a substitute for grasses. In rare cases such cats have even harmed themselves by biting into plants that are poisonous.

Many cat experts have puzzled over this behaviour and some have admitted frankly that they have no answer. Others have offered a variety of explanations. For many years the favourite reply was that the cats use grass as a laxative to help them pass troublesome hairballs lodged in their intestines. A related suggestion claimed that they were eating grass to make themselves vomit up the hairballs.

This was based on the observation that cats do sometimes vomit after eating grass, but it overlooked the possibility that whatever made the cats feel sick also made them want to eat grass, rather than that the grass-eating actually caused the vomiting.

A less popular explanation was that the grass aided the cats in the case of throat inflammation, or irritation of the stomach. Some authorities simply dismissed the activity as a way of adding roughage to the diet.

None of these explanations makes much sense. The amount of grass actually eaten is very small. Watching the cats chewing at long grasses, one gets the impression that they are merely taking in a little juice from the leaves and stems, rather than adding any appreciable solid bulk to their diet.

The most recent opinion and the most likely explanation is that cats chew grass to obtain minute quantities of a chemical substance that they cannot obtain from a meat diet and which is essential to their health.

The substance in question is a vitamin called folic acid, and it is vital to cats because it plays an important role in the production of haemoglobin. If a cat is deficient in folic acid its growth will suffer and it may become seriously anaemic. Cat-owners whose animals have no access to grasses of any kind sometimes solve the problem by planting grass seeds in a tray and growing a patch of long grass in their apartments for their pets to chew on.

Incidentally, it is worth pointing out that although cats may need this plant supplement to their meat diet, they are first and foremost carnivores and must be treated as such. Recent attempts by well-meaning vegetarians to convert their cats to a meat-free diet are both misguided and cruel. Cats rapidly become seriously ill on a vegetarian diet and cannot survive it for long. The recent publication of vegetarian diets recommended as suitable for cats is a clear case of animal abuse and should be dealt with as such.

The usual answer is that the whiskers are feelers that enable a cat to tell whether a gap is wide enough for it to squeeze through, but the truth is more complicated and more remarkable. In addition to their obvious role as feelers sensitive to touch, the whiskers also operate as air-current detectors. As the cat moves along in the dark it needs to manoeuvre past solid objects without touching them. Each solid object it approaches causes slight eddies in the air, minute disturbances in the currents of air movement, and the cat's whiskers are so amazingly sensitive that they can read these air changes and respond to the presence of solid obstacles even without touching them.

The whiskers are especially important – indeed vital – when the cat hunts at night. We know this from the following observations: a cat with perfect whiskers can kill cleanly both in the light and in the dark. A cat with damaged whiskers can kill cleanly only in the light; in the dark it misjudges its killing-bite and plunges its teeth into the wrong part of the prey's body. This means that in the dark, where accurate vision is impeded, healthy whiskers are capable of acting as a highly sensitive guidance system. They have an astonishing, split-second ability to check the body outline of the victim and direct the cat's bite to the nape of the unfortunate animal's neck. Somehow the tips of the whiskers must read off the details of the shape of the prey, like a blind man reading braille, and in an instant tell the cat how to react.

Photographs of cats carrying mice in their jaws after catching them reveal that the whiskers are almost wrapped around the rodent's body, continuing to transmit information about the slightest movement, should the prey still be alive. Since the cat is by nature predominantly a nocturnal hunter, its whiskers are clearly crucial to its survival.

Anatomically the whiskers are greatly enlarged and stiffened hairs more than twice the thickness of ordinary hairs. They are embedded in the tissue of the cat's upper lip to a depth three times that of other hairs, and they are supplied with a mass of nerve-endings which transmit the information about any contact they make or any changes in airpressure. On average the cat has twenty-four whiskers, twelve on each side of the nose, arranged in four horizontal rows. They are capable of moving both forwards, when the cat is inquisitive, threatening, or testing something, and backwards, when it is defensive or deliberately avoiding touching something. The top two rows can be moved independently of the bottom two, and the strongest whiskers are in rows two and three.

Technically whiskers are called vibrissae and the cat has a number of these reinforced hairs on other parts of its body – a few on the cheeks, over the eyes, on the chin and, surprisingly, at the backs of the front legs. All are sensitive detectors of movement, but it is the excessively long whiskers that are by far the most important vibrissae, and it is entirely apt that when we say that something is 'the cat's whiskers' we mean that it is rather special.

Because they possess an imageintensifying device at the rear of their eyes. This is a lightreflecting layer called the tapetum lucidum (meaning literally 'bright carpet'), which acts rather like a mirror behind the retina, reflecting light back to the retinal cells. With this, the cat can utilize every scrap of light that enters its eyes. With our eyes we absorb far less of the light which enters them. Because of this difference cats can make out movements and objects in the semi-darkness which would be quite invisible to us. Despite this efficient nocturnal ability it is not true that cats can see in complete darkness, as some people seem to believe.