The Hunter’s Table: How Cats Eat and Why They’re Good Pest Control

Before a cat eats, it sometimes does something odd: it goes for a walk.

If it’s not starving, a cat that has just killed prey may wander off for a few minutes. It looks like it’s taking a stroll. This pause probably helps the cat calm down. Hunting floods the body with adrenaline. A short walk lets the digestive system switch back on. During that pause, a prey animal that was only pretending to be dead might try to escape. It rarely works, but it sometimes does.

When the cat finally comes back to eat, it has to figure out how to swallow the meal. Small rodents are easy. The cat starts at the head and eats the whole thing. If it swallows the fur, it may throw it up later. Some cats leave the gallbladder and intestines. Others are too hungry to care and wolf down everything.

Birds are more complicated. Small birds are eaten whole, except for the tail and wing feathers. Medium birds, like thrushes and blackbirds, get some feathers pulled out first. The cat eats, pauses, pulls more feathers, eats again. Big birds, like pigeons, need a full plucking. The cat holds the bird down with its front paws, bites a clump of feathers, lifts its head, and shakes hard. It spits out the feathers and licks its mouth clean. Sometimes it stops to lick its flank—using its fur to clean its tongue, instead of the other way around. Only when all the feathers are gone does it start eating.

This plucking instinct seems to be built in. One researcher gave a dead pigeon to a wildcat in a zoo. The wildcat had only ever eaten chunks of raw meat. When it saw a bird with full feathers, it got excited and plucked the whole thing. Then it didn’t calm down—it turned to the grass and started plucking that, too, using the same motions, until the urge finally faded. Only then did it eat the pigeon. Plucking is a drive, and it doesn’t disappear just because the cat is in a cage.

Oddly, cats pluck differently on different continents. European cats use a zigzag pulling motion, shaking their heads side to side. American cats pull straight up in long vertical tugs, then shake. It’s a small difference, but it shows that cats on opposite sides of the Atlantic are not exactly the same.

Now, are cats good pest controllers? Historically, that’s the whole reason humans partnered with them. Long before cats were pets, they were hired help. They protected grain stores from rodents. And they were very good at it.

For a long time, farmers thought the best way to get a cat to hunt was to keep it hungry. That turns out to be wrong. A hungry farm cat wanders over a huge area looking for food. It kills fewer pests on the farm itself. A fed cat stays closer to home. It may not be hungry, but it still hunts, because hunting is not driven by appetite. It’s driven by instinct. So the best pest controller is a well-fed cat that sticks around.

One record-holding tabby lived in a Lancashire factory for twenty-three years and killed over twenty-two thousand mice—about three a day. A female tabby in London killed over twelve thousand mice in six years, averaging five or six a day. That’s why the ancient Egyptians treated cats as sacred. Killing one was a capital crime.