they have reaction times faster than snake strikes, can fall from 15 stories up and have a way to mitigate the impact to survive and can decimate bird populations in areas where they are wild because they have such successful hunting rates. they are pretty neat.
A lot of predators do. If a fox gets into a hen house, it kills everything it can. Pole cats (a type of weasel, not cat) does too. It's just the way they are wired.
I saw a juvenile raccoon that broke into a chicken coop. It killed every chicken in there. Then my older brother stabbed it in the eye with a barbeque fork. Which was horrifying to watch as a small child. It got away after that. I choose to believe it survived the ordeal. That it spent its remaining years on earth as a pirate raccoon.
It really wasn't the raccoon's fault it got into the chickens. It was supposed to hunt. We should have protected the chickens better. That was on us.
Also why humans probably don't need to protect them in the numbers we do. Domestic cats decimate other species for no reason and we basically help facilitate it
They also decimate populations of things we want decimated. The reason humans kept them around in the first place was to keep rats/mice and other pests away. So it's not really for no reason. Any area you see a cat prowling around regularly is an area that will have a very low rodent population.
Why people call that predation ? They don’t eat those
Is this going to be the day you learn that cats eat snakes? Because they do.
Feral cats and stray cats eat snakes as part of their diet, along with birds, mice, rats, frogs, and lizards. If it's small enough and they can catch it, they will eat it. They'll also eat baby animals of other species.
We're so used to seeing indoor cats eating dry food that we forget what they're actually like outside of our homes and apartments. We see our pets' hunting tendencies and we perceive that as playtime, or that it's some remnant behavior from their ancestors, but cats are brutal. Even the indoor ones. They're just spoiled and don't realize what they really are. And we see them as cute and lazy, so we assume that their predator instincts are subdued or weakened.
No! Cats eat snakes, and not just when they're starving.
I can't speak for snakes, but I can tell you that my cat eats each and every bird she kills, as well as mices. All I clean up after are a few feathers and kidneys.
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u/Neutronova Mar 05 '25
they have reaction times faster than snake strikes, can fall from 15 stories up and have a way to mitigate the impact to survive and can decimate bird populations in areas where they are wild because they have such successful hunting rates. they are pretty neat.