Cats Behaving Badly: Why Cats Do the Naughty Things They Do by Celia Haddon

Author:Celia Haddon [Haddon, Celia]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

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CAT TIP

Cats often hunt and bring home frogs from nearby garden ponds. Stopping cats catching them is impossible, but giving the frogs plenty of hiding places will reduce the numbers killed. Piles of wood, heaps of big stones, plenty of pond plants, and long grass around the pond will provide places where cats cannot get them.

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Wildlife casualties can also be reduced by careful management. Oddly enough, in gardens where the birds are fed at a bird table, one survey suggested that the casualty rate is lower rather than higher. Careful siting of bird boxes, bird tables, and feeders to positions where a cat cannot lie in wait will help. So too will spikes to stop cats climbing trees, and crumpled netting placed under shrubs from which the cat could ambush ground-feeding birds. Planting spikey shrubs such as holly and berberis in areas where birds need to perch will also deter cats.

CAT TALE: Clari, a ginger-and-white neutered tomcat, regularly hunts and kills snakes. He lives in the foothills of the Pyrenees in Southwest France, where both adders and nonpoisonous smooth snakes abound in the summer. His owners, Giles and Lisa, often find the mangled bodies on their patio on summer mornings.

Watching his method of preying on snakes is extremely worrying for his owners, who fear that he will get bitten. “Once he catches sight of a snake, he goes on ‘all alert’ and then, judging the moment very quickly, his first move is to seize the snake in his jaws at a point about its middle, so that it hangs down on each side of his mouth. He then runs fast to deposit it either inside the house (to the general panic of his humans!) or into his favorite thyme bushes on the terrace,” says Lisa.

If he has taken the snake into the house, and if Lisa and her husband Giles are around to see, then human intervention occurs, as the idea of it getting lost under the furniture and creeping out at night or whenever frightens them—as well it might. Often during this process (doors left wide open, rolled umbrellas, and walking sticks featuring large), Clari again seizes the snake in its middle and this time runs to dump it in the thyme bush.

Once it is there, Clari can survey its every movement and it can’t escape without him jumping upon it. He does indeed stir it into action by poking at it, if it lies still too long (too long for Clari). “He may well be relying on tiring it out, but he is also I think waiting for the moment when it is positioned just right for the fatal blow,” says Lisa. This is the killing-bite in the neck area. So far, he has been too quick to get bitten by a snake.

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