We all love cats, but are they really what we believe them to be? A common perception is that cats are lazy animals and prefer sleeping though most of the day. But has anyone actually seen a cat hunt? Their feline agility coupled with a primal necessity to kill make for an extremely dangerous animal to keep.

Have any of you wondered what feral cats and many domestic cats do at night? Take a look at the leopard. Many of you would have read Jim Corbett’s stories. One particular book comes to mind: ‘The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag’. It’s a fairly small book that describes a leopard whose usual haunts were the villages around Rudraprayag in what is now Uttarakhand, Northern India. The man-eater was notorious for having killed over a hundred and twenty-five people in its “career” as Corbett describes it. What is most interesting about the kills was that not a single one took place in daylight. Felids are nocturnal and hence most of the hunting takes place in the dark. Similarly, most feral and domesticated cats are active at night and that’s when most of the hunting happens.

On the first of December 2016, I was sitting at home in. My father said something which at first I ignored. Then, realising that he’d said Goose (my cat) was killing a snake. I rushed out to see that a small brown snake was dangling from Goose’s mouth and was struggling to escape. Goose then dropped it and picked it up to get a better grip. It was my mother who suggested I save the snake. It took me a while to get to my senses by which time Goose had inflicted a deep cut into the snake’s body. I tried pulling Goose away but was a little worried about getting scratched and bitten. It was futile and Goose was surprisingly intensely focused (which he usually is not) and intent on devouring the ophidian. I asked my mother to get some food for him from the kitchen while I tried to pull him away. It was only after cutting the snake in half that he finally let go. There was nothing left to be done and I kept the corpse aside to identify.

What happened while trying to identify it is another story for another day I found out that it was a Yellow-Green Cat Snake (Boiga flaviviridis Vogel and Ganesh, 2013). Goose, by then, has eaten the rear half of the cat snake and disappeared. But what surprised me the most was that I didn’t know of this side of Goose or of his predatory instincts as well as I thought I did. I was, of course, furious at the fact that he’d killed a snake, but then what next? Should I continue feeding him?

A docile cat?

Goose was brought up by my neighbours. He was something of a small guy and smaller than most of the other cats around. He was fed rice and milk with occasional curds but never meat. He was very social and friendly and had no issues with being petted. He was so friendly that he would climb up onto our laps and sleep. Since he was isolated from his mother, who typically would have taught him all the necessary skills to hunt, and also seemed to only sleep all day, I began to think he couldn’t hunt and get the right nutrition to grow up. I was convinced of this when he showed absolutely no interest in birds on the ground or in low bushes. Lizards, insects, and spiders were bold in his presence because he just refused to go after them. I usually had to wave spiders in his face for him to get interested in them, and even then he was a clumsy hunter. And for nearly 2 years I was convinced that Goose was the ideal pet. I had, of course, heard of feral cats hunting and killing, just for the joy of it, wild rodents, birds, lizards, and snakes. One of my friends did mention observing a full grown cat taking on a cobra. But Goose was different.

Seeing Goose kill the snake came as a nasty surprise to me. Even now as I write this I am unable to wrap my head around the irony of a cat killing a cat snake. Some days later my father told me that he’d seen Goose carrying a large mouse, and as usual, he “showed off” his (s)kill by dropping it at the doorstep.

Hunting, but it doesn’t stop there

For three reasons, cats and dogs are more successful at establishing themselves over native predators. Cats are protected from disease, not limited by the availability of prey, and least of all limited in numbers by territoriality. They are also immensely successful in places like islands and other naturally predator-free landscapes, where native wildlife has close to no adaptations to help avoid becoming prey.

Patterns of cats hunting wildlife have been well documented. In the United States itself, some 12.3 billion mammals and 2.4 billion birds are lost to free ranging pets and feral cats every year. There have been innumerable instances of this behaviour in cats from around the world, and animal protection societies frequently suggest keeping cats locked indoors at night or when most wild animals are active (see references for more). Naturalists and conservationists all over the world urge pet keepers to stay informed of their pet’s movements and ensure that they are well fed.

Other issues with free-ranging carnivorous animals are that they carry vastly novel diseases that wild animals they come in close contact with are unlikely to have been exposed to. These typically transmit from humans and other domestic animals such as cattle. Fragmented forest patches often have an inadequate reserves of food for the wildlife in it. Animals such as elephants are forced out and to use the food grown in crops such as banana plantations and sugarcane. Carnivores, due to lack of food venture into human habitation for food and are forced to interact with these feral animals, from which the diseases are more easily obtained. With prevalent fragmentation of forests, wild animals, especially those that live in closed social groups such as macaques and Wild Dogs, get restricted to fragments and hence are more susceptible to epidemics of these diseases. Added to this, certain carnivorous cat species that have very low genetic diversity, can suffer a lot of damage with the added impact of these introduced diseases. Asiatic lions in Gir are a single isolated population and even a few lions contracting something like canine distemper could potentially wipe out the entire population.

Stray and feral dogs that are a very common sight in cities and towns not only pose a health hazard to humans by spreading rabies and other diseases but also attack and kill children. Adults aren’t spared from brutal attacks either. Dogs are known to regularly hunt Black-naped Hares and other small mammals. Stray dogs at the IIT Madras campus have been reported to hunt Spotted Deer and on occasion even the endangered Blackbuck. Despite measures taken to capture and relocate dogs from inside the campus, a large number of them are hard to catch and remain in the wilderness. Regardless of such efforts, stray dogs continue to migrate in and out of such places and there’s almost no shortage of them at any given point of time.

Islands are prime examples for cats hunting a species to extinction. The best known example of this is the Stephens Island Wren. The case of the Rockwren was very similar to that of the dodo in the sense that they were found only on a small island. There was a light-house on that island and three keepers lived on the island with their families and a tutor for their children. One or more cats were kept by these families and a cat, known as Tibbles, was notorious for having hunted in its career all the endemic Stephens Island Wren (Traversia lyalli). It is said that the bird went extinct, while it was being discovered for the first time by one of the keepers of the lighthouse. Although this may not be the complete story, it serves as an example of how invasive feral carnivores can destroy native ecosystems. As I have mentioned earlier this isn’t the complete story. I will be writing more about this particular case in a later article.

New Zealand is also home to a very unique series of reptiles not found anywhere around the globe. Several species have gone extinct in the few thousand years it has been occupied by human beings. There was another cat in whose 17 years of life, it hunted over 558 recorded animals of which 223 were birds. Although the birds survived, the cat is known to have exterminated all the rabbits which it later seemed to prefer. It, however, must be noted that it was not merely cats that were involved in these extinctions but also household pests that accompanied humans onto the islands that played a crucial role.

Last words: responsible pet ownership

What next? I think the key point to be kept in mind here is responsible pet ownership. This is a discussion riddled in ambiguous ethical principles and accountability is almost never considered. Legal restrictions and various problematic policies on dealing with the issue make it harder to address. I’ve tried to discuss this aspect of the issue in another post.