I was in between prepared batches of cat food on Saturday morning. I had a bunch of frozen meat defrosting but had used the last of the previous batch of food. Anyway…
Since I didn’t have food cut up and mixed and the cats were hungry, I offered each cat a whole gizzard - not cut up.
My senior cat, Tangent, chowed down and the gizzard was gone in a flash. My feral kitten, Farrell, had a different reaction.
She hooked the gizzard with a saber-sharp claw and drug it off the plate, then picked it up with her mouth, “killed it” with a good shake, and proudly carried the now-dead gizzard off into the bedroom and dropped it on the wool area rug.
Farrell spent the next ten minutes throwing that prize up into the air, dropping it, running around the corner of the bed so she could plan her attack: sneak up, stalk, attack, pounce, and kill. She killed that tricky gizzard over and over again, from several different angles.
In the back of my mind I was thinking, “This is pretty disgusting from a hygiene standpoint,” but she was having so much fun toying with the gizzard that I just let her go at it. It was amusing watching her natural hunting instincts take over. I could imagine her being out in the wild catching a mouse for a mid-morning snack.
In the future, I’ll probably say “Don’t play with your food,” but Saturday morning I just stood there and watched her have a blast, hunting and killing gizzard.
Since I didn’t have food cut up and mixed and the cats were hungry, I offered each cat a whole gizzard - not cut up.
My senior cat, Tangent, chowed down and the gizzard was gone in a flash. My feral kitten, Farrell, had a different reaction.
She hooked the gizzard with a saber-sharp claw and drug it off the plate, then picked it up with her mouth, “killed it” with a good shake, and proudly carried the now-dead gizzard off into the bedroom and dropped it on the wool area rug.
Farrell spent the next ten minutes throwing that prize up into the air, dropping it, running around the corner of the bed so she could plan her attack: sneak up, stalk, attack, pounce, and kill. She killed that tricky gizzard over and over again, from several different angles.
In the back of my mind I was thinking, “This is pretty disgusting from a hygiene standpoint,” but she was having so much fun toying with the gizzard that I just let her go at it. It was amusing watching her natural hunting instincts take over. I could imagine her being out in the wild catching a mouse for a mid-morning snack.
In the future, I’ll probably say “Don’t play with your food,” but Saturday morning I just stood there and watched her have a blast, hunting and killing gizzard.
