Speaking of animals and food oddities, my dog used to carry his food one mouthful at a time out to the living room so he could eat around us. He’d drop it on the floor and then leisurely eat it and go back for more.
This has been debunked, unfortunately, male cats do this too, and they don’t teach kittens to hunt.
It is believed now, they simpltdo this because they want to bring their prey to their core territory. Which is also where you are.
My fatto catto has somehow learned to catch chipmunks but i am unsure if he cant (because he is mostly toothless) kill them or wont. He will bring them to me to show his prowess just… Jammed in his jaws until i praise him and give him a treat to drop the lil guy who quits playing dead and scampers off. Three chipmunk messiahs have been ressurrected thusly.
Funnily enough this has not caused the chipmunks to respect him. A younger chipmunk came up while my killer was recharging in the sun and pulled his butt hair and once he had his attention, scampered off to his safe space on the fence to chirp. I dunno if it’s the same guy but when my cat is inside there’s one little dude who will come by my door to looking for him. Shits like Tom and Jerry out here
My parent’s cat would do the same thing. They hated it because they had to get the messiah chipmunks out of the house.
My orange idiot will wait at the door with a mouse in his mouth until I let him in and then put it on the ground and scream at me to make sure I see it. He’ll never eat it.
My old house ended up with a mouse problem in the utility room (which was weird, we couldnt find where they were coming from, and never any mouse evidence in any other room, so we could only guess it was because it was warm? The mice were pretty skinny) And my single orange brain cell absolutely loved playing with them if they ignored the set traps and crawled under the door. He would play and play and play, until I guess the mouse simply died of exhaustion or maybe being chomped just right.
Anyway, it was dead, and he’d still bat it around, and eventually I’d hear him yowling as if he’d lost a toy somewhere he can’t reach, and sure enough he batted the dead mouse under the couch down there.
To this day, toy mice are by far his favorite thing to play with. He’ll play with feathered wands and catnip kickers, but a toy mouse he’ll play with alone or with you any time of day for up to a couple hours at a time.
…our orange kitty does the same, but he’s the smartest cat we’ve ever known: perfectly adept at opening doors on his own, so we must keep them all deadbolted lest we find wild critters brought into the house, which has happened on several occasions…
(he’s also pretty good at operating our ipads and desktop computers; he’s sent gibberish text-messages more than once and i worry that someday he’ll buy something online!)
Then why do they put it down right by you and leave it? When it’s for themselves, they’ll eat it or play with it. At least my mob do.
