Natural Science Forum / Biology / Biology / May 2005

I am very much suspicious of your claim of 0.8 kg versus 3kg. From my own
experience in shoveling up a dead body of a (lead-free pellet shooting) of a
mature cottontail is about the equal weight of my female Manx cat. And this Manx
cat easily pulls down cottontails as judging from the leftover fur underneath the
building she lives. There is a neighborhood orange tomcat that regularly goes
through the grounds hunting specifically for rabbits. And I have seen on occasion
about 3 rabbits come running in my direction and I was bewildered as to why they
came running into my direction and then I spotted the reason-- the orange tomcat
was on its rounds. So apparently rabbits have some sort of group communication.

I dispute your claim of a rabbit hole. From what I have seen of rabbits is that
they work out a flight-path which involves woods and thickets and brush and
woodpiles and stacks of material. I noticed a baby rabbit keep running through a
hedge row and would come back and forth. And then I realized that this baby rabbit
was working out a flight-path in case a predator comes along.

I noticed that the usual behaviour of a rabbit under chase is that the rabbit
knows its pathway that involves stops or halts to a predator chasing it. They love
brambles and sticker hedges because as soon as the dog come close, the dog is
forced to stop. The rabbit has a hole into and through the stickers but the dog
stops at the edge. The only time I have seen a rabbit remain is when it feels
secure in the pile of wood or pile of concrete where the predator cannot follow
into, but no hole in the ground is safe from a dog. So the rabbit seems to send
the dog through a maze that stops and halts the dog along the way whereas the
rabbit goes running away further to another maze.

I suspect the manner of a Cat that catches a mature cottontail is that the Cat has
a longer term memory. The cat is on a prowl looking for where a rabbit nests. A
pile of wood is a great cat vantage point because the cat realizes the rabbit
lives in the pile of wood and the cat smells out the rabbits entry and exit points
and then the cat perches on top of the wood for hours and hours and perhaps days
and when the rabbit comes out. Either the rabbit does not have a memory like the
cat to know that the cat is still around and waiting or whether the rabbit knows
the cat is waiting still, but has to forage in order to live.

So I think the secret to cat preying on rabbits is that they figure out where a
rabbit lives and nests and then waits perched on high to pounce on the rabbit when
it comes out. Anyone know of the brain size of rabbits compared to cats? I think
they are about the same. But brain size is no indication of whether one animal has
a longer memory capacity to the other animal.

What I need to be clarified is how the cat uses its claws when catching a rabbit.
Whether the claws are able to hold the rabbit long enough for that vertebrae bite
to the neck that you speak of.

What is amazing about this whole thread is that humanity does not have a
eye-witness account of how cats kill rabbits. I do not mean tame rabbits but wild
rabbits in the wild. We have film of rare animals and on TV some months back some
wildlife photographer captured snow tigers and how they live and prey. Another
photographer captured the behaviour of about 5 or 7 species of rare African
big-cats and how they live. But what is ironic and funny is that not a single
human being has captured on film how a common cat catches wild rabbits which must
happen almost daily as we speak. Perhaps one of the reasons no person has captured
on film this behaviour of cats is because rabbits forage mostly at night time and
perhaps no photographer has gone out at night to film this behaviour.

So I think what happens, should some photographer finally capture cat behaviour on
film is that the cat figures out where the rabbit nests and then perches on high
near the entrance or exit and the cat is so much more patient then the rabbit and
when the rabbit starts to come out the cat springs on top of the rabbit. And how
the claws play into the fight kill with the bite on the neck to sever the spinal
cord.

So much of TV is filled with garbage. We called it the "wasteland" in the 1960s.
Stuff that wastes a persons lifetime, not enhances it. What should be on TV is
programs like the big-cats of Africa. And a show on how cats actually catch and
kill rabbits. Instead of the "petty-airhead actors and actresses" filling the TV
waves, fill it with something of genuine value and interest-- such as how cats
catch rabbits. TV should be about 90% science and not shows depicting airhead
people.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies