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As I make my way through the house, she lies in wait, crouched in pouncing posture, head poking through the living room blinds just so, keeping an eye out for the squirrels which enjoy a daily breakfast at the dried corn feeder my wife and I placed on our front porch. Sure, there's a sliding glass door separating her from living in all of her primeval and powerful glory, but it doesn't do anything to lessen the intense stare in her eyes. On the surface, she's just a basic, tame house cat, but in her heart, she's a well-trained killing machine.
And she even plays fetch with my spent beer bottle caps.
Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows just how mysterious and perplexing these creatures can be. Anyone who has ever owned a cat which roams the outdoors knows these creatures can be cold blooded killers, laying their kill on your doorstep as either an offering of gratitude or a warning of your impending fate. One can never tell.
While their predatory nature might be well understood by their owners (or is it masters?), some University of Georgia researchers decided to attach cameras to some 60 or more pet cats as they roamed outdoors to see what happens when these creatures are allowed to tap into their primordial instincts.
"The results were certainly surprising, if not startling," said Kerrie Anne Loyd, University of Georgia student and lead author of the KittyCam study, speaking to the Detroit Free Press.
"In Athens-Clarke County, (Ga.) we found that about 30% of the sampled cats were successful in capturing and killing prey, and that those cats averaged about one kill for every 17 hours outdoors or 2.1 kills per week. It was also surprising to learn that cats only brought 23% of their kills back to a residence. We found that house cats will kill a wide variety of animals, including: lizards, voles, chipmunks, birds, frogs, and small snakes."
This means that, of all the deaths our cats are responsible for, we only know about less than a quarter of them. Truly frightening.
These UG students performed their research in association with the National Geographic Society's "crittercam" program, which aims to display how other creatures see the world.
Cat owners volunteered their cats - some happily so no doubt - to wear these small, waterproof cameras to record their activity for 5 to 6 hours each day. All told, the UG researchers were able to capture up to 37 hours of on-the-prowl footage for each cat.
After watching the clips, the researchers concluded that birds made up 13% of these cats' prey. This means that cats are likely responsible for the deaths of more than 1 billion birds and other animals each year.
And to think, we let them live in our house and buy specialty foods for them.
"If we extrapolate the results of this study across the country and include feral cats, we find that cats are likely killing more than 4 billion animals per year, including at least 500 million birds," said Dr. George Fenwick, president for the Bird Conservancy, according to the Detroit Free Press.
In fact, cats kill so many birds per year, they're causing the decline of some bird species.
Now that we're on to them, It's possible the cats could join forces and begin to turn their claws on their owners.
Again, this should come as no surprise to any cat owner, as they've long suspected it would only be a matter of time before their pets have their final say.
When asked for a comment, my cat looked at me as if annoyed, turned her back, hiked up one leg, and began to clean herself, assumedly getting ready for my demise.
I can see it in her eyes.
"He knows too much," she thinks as she stares out the window.
Reader Comments
Our cat (when I was a kid) was rescued from living in the wild by my sister's teacher.
She caught animals all the time and often brought them home. She liked to half-kill them, them play with them on the porch as they tried to run away. She often didn't eat them, at least not in front of us. We thought she was this way because of her time in the wild. Guess not!
But my theory is that cats learn this from people.
We feed them, so why eat those nasty raw dead animals? It's much more fun to just chase them down and break their necks and leave them there or play with them as they die.
If we were stripped of all our humanity and left operating on the genetic commands of our wild bodies, wouldn't we behave similarly? And don't we behave similarly to a certain extent anyway? If being "domesticated" is not a big problem for us, why should it be one for our cats?
This stretches the point too far, doesn't it? I did enjoy the article, though.
oh please-- give me a break and ---GET A LIFE---
And so i suspect the number of cats' victims, projected like this, is very extreme!
AND dogs also kill. My tiny little king charles cavalier has already brought one dead bird into the house, and the look on her face when she sees chippies on the deck - well, let's just say that if my whole yard was fenced, and I could let her out freely, I wouldn't have a chippie problem anymore!
I've grown up with cats for the most part so I can attest to their true nature as hunters, as I bet most other outdoor cat owners can. One cat I had was particularly rough and wild. He was a tabby who grew large and muscular and was very strong. I think his condition was a good balance of genetics and environment, as my family lived by a forest in a rural area where there lots of small wild animals.
Once, as a kid, I almost couldn't get him in the cat carrier to go the vet, having to use all my strength and suffering a few scratches, and once I finally forced him in and closed the door, he rammed it repeatedly and tried to push it open with his head, then went to work on the plastic latches, making a lot of claw marks in them. His meow was extremely deep - it almost sounded like a moo. I can't explain how a cat that got neutered seemed to have a huge amount of excess testosterone. To express affection he liked to rub his head on people, which is normal, but he did it more like a headbutt, and another way was to bite - once he clamped his teeth on the skin around my brother's eyebrow and pulled it a considerable distance, eliciting much pain from my brother, and within a short time period of that, was eating trail mix from a bowl on the coffee table. I saw him fall about fifteen feet from a tree branch once (he loved tree-climbing) and land on his back and when I rushed over to see if he was alright he was rolling around on his back, purring, then got up and seemed fine. As kids he'd lead my brother and I for walks through the forest, stopping to wait for us to catch up if he was getting far ahead. He also played fetch with scrunched up balls of paper.
He spent a lot of time hunting and would sometimes be gone for a few days, though usually he came back multiple times a day to leave critter corpses, usually voles, out front of the house. Once I saw him swallow an entire vole, then regurgitate it later, very slimy. Not sure how that was possible. He brought back the odd frog or small snake and some squirrels, chipmunks, and birds. The biggest thing he brought back was a young rabbit, about half grown. He trotted over to my brother and sister and I carrying it right after we got off the school bus, and he was purring and looking quite happy as we congratulated him for the kill.
My family had some birdfeeders near the edge of woods with branches extending near them that squirrels could use for accessibility and he'd often sit, crouch, or even lie down underneath them and wait for something to catch. Once he was sitting under an approximately six foot high feeder casually, with a big content cat smile on his face, watching a squirrel feed. I was watching from a nearby glass door. The squirrel looked confident and also happy, as it glanced down a few times but calmly went about its feeding, with a "you're not gonna get me" look. I looked back and forth from the two, thinking I knew what was going to happen. The cat looked sly but calm and still happy, like he knew that I knew but was going to stay still and not interfere - at least that's how it seemed to my 8 year old mind, so I stayed still and also tried to look calm, though I was feeling eager. The squirrel crouched, then jumped for the nearest tree branch. As soon as it was in the air the cat launched himself from his sitting position all six feet up and caught it with his mouth by the throat, landing with a motionless squirrel in his mouth.
And once, I watched him chase away a whole family of raccoons from the backyard.
Yes, cats are definitely tough, vicious, and lethal predators at heart. They're much more entertaining that way than as forced docile de-clawed decorations, especially when their diet is full of meat, not just processed kibble, which is not a suitable staple for a natural carnivore (for the most part) - the human equivalent is cereal, and you wouldn't do well primarily eating that.