My cat catches and eats mice. Eats 'em from nose to tail. Except, he won’t eat one organ, something smooth and grey-green. What is the thing he won’t eat?
WAG: gall bladder.
More likely the caecum. At least that’s what most of my cats would never eat. My current cat eats even that (and then barfs up the whole mouse an hour later.) The gall bladder is likely to be avoided in larger animals, such as rabbits. It is bright green, in my experience.
This suggests that the gall bladder in a mouse is too small for you to notice easily, and is a “tiny white dot”:
The only thing my cats eat are the heads. I don’t think I want to know why.
The cat owner who filmed this captured a pretty good image that appears to be the intact rodent uterus with a very visible placenta and multiple fetuses. My cat has left several of these behind too and it took me a while to figure out what they were.
But why doesn’t the cat eat it?
My cat leaves that gray-greenish organ behind as well … I first suspected kidney, but it’s too big for that… size-wise and according to the form it would be the stomach. But I’m not sure neither. I never think of asking the vet when I am there
How interesting, I never knew cats would do that. (When I owned cats they would disassemble the occasional mouse they caught but seemed to be uninterested in eating them)
I wonder if there’s a reason for them doing that? They don’t like the taste perhaps?
My cat likes to eat just one half (front or back) of the mouse and leave the other half directly in the path I take to let the dogs out first thing in the morning, before my eyes are working correctly. She doesn’t seem to prefer one half over the other, which leads me to believe there isn’t one particular organ that is anathema to cats. Could it be a segment of intestine containing something unpalatable?
I thought they left it as a present to you?
it has a kidney-shaped form but is far too big in relation to a louse to be a kidney. you can simply pick it up… the surface is dry and clean…
might be the cat doesn’t like the stomach acids
Well, I quite like beef muscle tissue, but I hate the taste of beef liver (or any liver, for that matter). The various cats I’ve had have all had individual food likes and dislikes. So maybe it IS that the cats don’t like the taste. Or they are amateur anatomists, and would appreciate some paw-friendly scalpels and tweezers.
Mr AaronX
Sir
I send you half the
Kidne I took from one mousie
prasarved it for you tother piece
I fried and ate it was very nise.
From
your bedroom
I’m a bit rusty on cat talk, but I thought it would be something like,
“I gives you mousie, you makez cheezburger?”
I will not eat it from a mouse
I will not eat it from a louse
I do not like green organ jam
I do not like it, Cat-I-Am
zombie or no
i’ve seen cats swallow mice whole in 10 seconds. crush the skull a few times and swallow head first.
there may be a difference between outdoor, indoor and inbetweener cats. if it is food you need you don’t want to loose it to another animal.
JtR reference.
One of my former cats used to almost-kill mice and leave them in my shoes, still twitching. The first time, my foot finished the job. Though the cat’s gone now, and I don’t have mice anyway, I still shake out my shoes before putting them on.
It’s most likely the liver. Less than an inch, probably less than a half-inch? I have had a cat leave identifiable livers around after mousing. The bile pigments in the liver can make it appear more green after death, rather than the red-brown of a live liver.
Speaking here as someone who has seen my share of both live and dead livers.