Barbara Hart Radisavljevic
Cats Were Designed to Eat Meat
We have to face the fact that God made cats to eat meat – fresh meat. He designed them to catch their meat in the wild. Throughout history man has depended upon cats to help him keep the rodent population in check.
My neighbor’s cat, Pumpkin, was the sweetest cat you’d ever want to meet. That is her photo, above. She was a great help to me in keeping the rodent population down on our property.
Pumpkin Eats a Gopher
Pumpkin, as affectionate as she is to people, is a great hunter. I saw her one day with this gopher (bless her) as I was leaving the house. She was not playing with it. She was eating it.
As you see here, eating involves movement. You can also see that cats don’t like “greasy, grimy gopher guts” any more than people do. See how Pumpkin has left the innards neatly behind her?
Cats Are Possessive of their Prey, and They Have Rules
In the photo below, you can see something has distracted Pumpkin.
Pumpkin has noticed that Nickie, another of her human’s cats, is watching her. Nickie is pretending to be asleep, but probably is focused on Pumpkin’s dining. Nickie will not try to take the gopher away from Pumpkin. Cats know the rules. You don’t steal prey from another cat. It just isn’t done. According to J.M. Masson (The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats) this is true even if the cat with the prey is on the bottom of the cat hierarchy and the top cat is watching.
Pumpkin, assured that Nickie is following the rules, goes back to the serious business of eating, still discarding what she doesn’t want to eat. If she were my cat, she would probably leave those parts on my porch by the door as my cat Trouble used to do. I don’t know the significance of this, and neither did J.M. Masson. Maybe cats like to make us a present without sacrificing the parts they most like to eat themselves. Or maybe this is a delicacy they offer us. Many cats love organ meats from calves. But maybe the gopher guts aren’t as tasty as calves’ liver.
As we see in this picture, eating is hard work. No knives and forks or humans to cut the meat in pieces. One has to use one’s claws and teeth.
I think this is where we came in. I had to leave for the post office at this point. I didn’t find any remains the next day, so someone must have eaten what Pumpkin didn’t want. Coyotes? The roaming opossum? Nickie? What do you think?
Pictures and content are original and may not be used without permission, B. Radisavljevic, Copyright 2016, All Rights Reserved
They are lucky.This type of cat is very Tactical.
Yes. Her strategy is effective.
Gorgeous cat! Yesterday, I saw this comic where a cat hunted a bird and the owner scolded his cat for that. On the next they, the cat owner got home bringing chicken, leaving the cat extremely confused. Double standards!
Love that! Thanks for sharing it.
Nice post!Beautiful!
My cats don’t go outside, in fact I used to have a hamster and once it got out and my cats ran from it like it was a pit bull. Somehow I don’t think my cats would fair well hunting outside…hehehe. Nice post….I love cats! 🙂
You might be surprised. After my mom, who hardly ever let her cat outside even during the day, died, I kept the house and still made daily visits to take care of the cat. Mom was sure the cat wouldn’t know what to do with a mouse. The cat’s hunting had been limited to house spiders.
I knew the cat loved to go out, so when I was here I’d let her out for a bit each day if the weather was nice. The yard is fenced and she would never even go near the fence. She normally stayed pretty close to the patio door and I could see her.
One day after I’d let her back in I went into another room. When I returned, I saw the cat playing with a tiny baby mouse she’d brought in from outside. My first thought? I wish Mom could see this! I can’t remember what happened to the mouse, but I’m quite sure it didn’t stay inside!
The ‘leavings’ could have been cleaned up by crows, ravens, jays, or magpies, too.
You are very right, though. Cats are strictly carnivorous. That doesn’t mean that they will always refuse to eat plant matter, but in the wild, less than 5% of a cat’s diet is made up of plant material. Their bodies aren’t set up to digest plants. If they are fed a diet with more than 10-15% of it coming from plants, the cat is going to get weak and ill. It is just a matter of time.
We have had cats that love certain fruits or vegetables. One of my cats likes cooked potatoes, for instance. I let him have a very small amount once in a while as a treat, but make sure that he doesn’t get too much and doesn’t get potatoes often. (Some cat food is very high in plant material, up to 40%, and that is very unhealthy for cats. If the label ingredients say anything but meat or meat byproducts in the first for ingredients, the food isn’t healthy for cats.)
Thank you for elaborating on the proper diet for cats. As finicky as some cats are, I’ve found that mine have rarely chosen anything but meat, poultry, birds, or fish. They may refuse some brands of meat or fish cat food, but I think there’s a reason we don’t see many vegetarian cat foods on the market.
We have lots of coyotes around, they could have been the culprit. Both of my rescued cats were front declawed when I got them, so they always stay indoors. But I have a screen room they visit a lot, they can at least smell the outside and I know they are safe.
I”m glad you keep them in. All my new neighbor’s cats have disappeared. One seems to have been run over, but I hate to think what happened to my favorite, Sarah, who just disappeared. The new neighbor only kept the dogs in at night — not the five cats. Now they have more cats and do keep them inside at night.
That is a shame. My cats also seem happy to be indoors.
I love cats. I love the pictures of your cat.
I wish she had been my cat. If she were, I’d still have her. But she belonged to our tenant in a mobile home on our property. And she moved.
We have two cats at home. They are vegetarian. Though, they are carnivorous in nature, but our cats are too choosy to eat meat. They prefer to eat vegetables than meat.
I find it hard to believe that any cat is vegetarian by choice. What sort of vegetables to they eat?
…..Leafy vegetables…..