Compassionate mousers

Mrs. Phactor noted a very realistic cat toy at the bottom of the basement stairs; it looked real because it was real.  Every now and again a mouse finds its way into the house and if noticed it gets the kitty-girls very excited. This came to TPP's attention because of the number of decorative items that got knocked over during the excitement and some general house disarray. The extent of the excitement wasn't apparent at first because everybody was taking a nap (necessary after a good workout)  by the time TPP got home. Mrs. Phactor wanted the carcass removed and it was in quite good repair and as it turned out it wasn't actually dead, just exhausted. As mentioned before our thoroughly domesticated pets have no killer instinct although their stalking, chasing, and pouncing instincts are quite good.  So even after being pounced on by well-armed, terribly big predators some 200-250 times bigger than itself, the mouse was undamaged.  So it would appear that neither of our kitty-girls learned how to kill prey. And so this blog ends well for the mouse who is back outside probably living quite well on spilled bird seed.

Cat behavior - instinct and learned

Cats have it pretty good around the Phactor household.  Kibble twice a day, lots of places to sleep, lots of nice windows, humans to provide some rubbing and petting when it's wanted.  What a deal.  Cats have a lot of hard-wired behaviors, things they do instinctively.  The younger of our two cats gets to venture outside at the end of a long leash, and she's amazingly good at stalking.  She drops and belly crawls forward, then freezes when the animal looks back, she uses the terrain for cover, and sometimes she gets surprisingly close for a cat on a cord.  Both like to play with things sort of hidden, grabbing for toys and the like, and not too gently either (fingers are not toys).  Both like to play with fuzzy toys, and the younger one plays really rough, a toy terror.  Both are fully armed with claws.  So last night and this morning some interesting sport arrived in the personage of a mouse in the house.  Oh, so very interesting. With the game so lop-sided, two large carnivores against one small prey animal, you figure this game isn't going to last long.  The older cat cornered the mouse behind a round garbage bin, and she moved as if she knew what she was doing.  But then the mouse made what looked like a fatal error and scooted for a safer place running right in front of the cat, right under her nose.  And she froze.  No grabbing it, no snapping at it, no pouncing!  What gives?  It was just as if she didn't know what to do.  The younger cat has reacted similarly.  After a stealthy stalk, she came nose to nose with her "prey", a youngish squirrel.  And she did nothing.  The game was over.  This makes you think that the stalking, the interest in the movement, and everything right up to the moment of truth in hunting is pretty instinctual, but neither of them knows how to kill their prey.  It's like their kitty brain gets up to the end of the hardwired behavior, and then their brain says, "Now what?"  So the mouse continues to roam the house.  Maybe it'll get chased to death, the cats like that part of the game, but it won't be dispatched by either of our cats actually attacking it to kill it.  The mother barn cats of my youth used to bring back almost dead mice for their kittens to "play" with, and it makes you think that the kittens had to learn how to kill their prey, an experience our pampered pets lack.  Or they just didn't want to sully the taste of kibble with mouse.     

Understanding the biology of icky yuckiness

There in the back of your fridge is an undated, unidentified leftover. Whether you decide to eat it or not may depend upon how desperately hungry you are, but even then you will probably check the smell and appearance. If it smells yucky and looks icky, you will probably not eat it. If you go so far, its taste may be unappealing too. And without question some of the subtances involved can be very toxic. Our instinct is to avoid ickylooking, yucky smelling slimy food growing fuzzy.

This all has a nice evolutionary explanation. Many microorganisms, bacteria and fungi, make a living by decomposition of organic material. When this organic material is your food, they compete with us for it. So your decision to pass on something that clearly was food (unless it was something a biologist stored in the fridge for another reason, but more on this another time) means the microorganisms have won the competition.

What if the microorganisms, which surely are present, did not make the leftovers icky or yucky looking? Well, then we would surely eat the food, microorganisms and all, and their ability to produce offspring would drop to zero. The ability of microorganisms to make food look icky and yucky in a hurry is directly related to their reproductive success. In other words, those microorganisms who are most successful at warning off their gargantuan competitors win the competitions most often and leave the most offspring.

And there is a flip side too. Those humans who responded best to these signels from microorganisms avoided potentially unsafe, toxic foods, and so both parties in this interaction "win" so to speak. This is how instinctual likes and dislikes are shaped. All of our ancestors thought toxic ickiness was to be avoided, and those who did not ended up at the shallow end of the gene pool.

Now of course not all microorganisms produce toxic metabolic byproducts, and we have learned to like some safe "spoiled" foods, like cheese and sauerkraut. Because our instincts have been shaped by toxic food spoilers, innocuous food spoilers can hide in plain sight, so long as they make our food look icky too.

Hopefully this has given you new insights on appreciating the mystery items from the deep recesses of your fridge.