Free Catwatching by Desmond Morris
Authors: Desmond Morris
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.
How efficient is the cat as a pest-killer?
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.
Why
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.
How efficient is the cat as a pest-killer?
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.
Why