Yesterday in conversation I stated that if you locked up a pet dog and a pet cat, and made them fight to the death, the dog would win because of its superior size.
In real life (e.g. gray wolf or similar, in the wild, vs. African wildcat or similar), they would both avoid each other because it would not be worthwhile for the wolf to go to the effort of killing a cat.
The conversation devolved into arguments of what is the size of the average pet dog vs. the average pet cat, the fact that cats have sharper claws and teeth, etc.
I still state that your average dog will win vs. the average cat. True? Or maybe unanswerable?
Domestic cats seem to kill things via trauma and bleeding. I haven’t watched farm cats or other real hunters do their job but I imagine they would have developed techniques to kill more effectively. Supposedly cougars learn techniques from their mother and tend to kill through suffocation / neck trauma. But cougar are big with powerful jaws.
Dogs instinctively kill through neck trauma, shaking to death any prey small enough.
A cat can present a fierce barrier of claws but they are not likely to have a viable method of incapacitating a dog.
A dog just has to grab the cat and shake it. I have seen them do it. Over very quickly.
A lapdog? Probably an even match; maybe the cat has a slight edge. A big German Shepherd or similar? The cat lasts 5 seconds if it can’t find a tree to climb.
Dogs often won’t kill cats because it’s not worth the effort, and the cat than thus discourage it. Proper cage situation where the dog can’t make that decision? The cat is history.
[Disclaimer - I’ve never seen either species kill the other, nor have I seen either in a cage fight; this is pure speculation based on my own observation of my own dogs and cats; but when a dog’s got something smaller by the neck, it’s history].
Well, if you were going to - hypothetically - cage fight two animals, what asshat is going to pit a 10-pounder against a 60-pounder? Pound for pound, cats win.
Of course a big dog vs house cat is no contest. Duh.
Well the original asshat, I’m sorry… original poster, specified average household petdog vs household pet cat. Anybody here got a 60 pound house cat?
I’m thinking to find a 60 pound cat you’re bringing a wild animal into the discussion. Not the original query here.
But to go there.
Completely anecdotal, but my 20 pound dog killed a big ole raccoon. I know, not a cat, but still, coons are some mean ass mofos. I think she could take on an average house cat, so we don’t have to limit discussion to a dog that is significantly bigger. I’ll just go ahead and say it, my 20 pound Schipperke could take a comparable sized house cat.
Nobody knows how many house cats have killed people because the cat’s know to make it look like an accident.
I saw a cat versus dog victim where both animals were equal size. The dog lost, he didn’t die but he was covered in scratches and bites and looked like he wanted to die of embarrasment.
I had a 20# Tom cat that would pretty much eat your dog. Cats grab on and rake with their hind claws, disembowling larger creatures.
I’d say pound for pound, both equally experienced with killing, a cat would win due to the claws. Of course, your average dog is bigger- and most cats have killing experience while most dogs don’t.
I knew a cat killing dog once, though, he just grabbed them and shook them dead, like a giant terrier with a large rat. But he was 50# or so.
In all of these steel cage deathmatches, if it really is a fight to the death, it pretty much always comes down to total mass. Predators might have a small edge over non-predators, but that’s not relevant here, since they’re both predators. An if they’re the same size, then it can really go either way.
All that said, I suspect that the typical housecat would be quicker than the typical housedog to realize that it’s a fight to the death, and start behaving accordingly. This would give the cat an initiative advantage which might be enough to decide the fight in the cat’s favor.
I guess where I’m coming from is that average size isn’t really discernible. I don’t think. I can’t seem to find any studies where the size of the average household dog has been determined. Average size of breeds, yes, but even if we had an idea from the AKC of how many registered dogs they have, of each kind of breed, and averaged that, it’s still not a large enough percentage to account for all the mixed breeds. If I was pressed to WAG it, I’d say 40 to 60 pounds, and in that case it’s a moot argument, no question, I don’t know why anyone would think a small predator would be able to kill a far larger predator one-on-one with no tricks or “secret weapons”. Doesn’t happen.
That’s where my pound for pound argument came in. Cats are not as inbred and specialized as dogs, so their size is fairly average. Average cat size is 10 pounds.
10 pound cat vs. 10 pound dog: cat wins. Thing is, the cat probably won’t kill the dog in a spectacular, fast fashion. The cat would lacerate the hell out of the dog, probably at least one eye, too. There wouldn’t be a suffocating, jugular/tracheal hold like big cats do. The house cat would end up kind of - shredding - the dog. It would take hours if not days for the dog to eventually expire from infection or bleeding.
At any rate, none of us plan to ever find out, anyway, right?
That doesn’t sound to me like “cat wins”; that sounds to me like “dog loses”. Thing is, though, there’s nothing that says they can’t both lose: If the cat mortally wounds the dog, then the dog takes out the cat’s throat, then the dog bleeds to death, it’s kind of hard to declare a winner.
In real life, people who fight animals for sport are all kinds of asshat.
On topic – on a dog message board I frequent, one poster has a dog who has killed numerous stray cats that wander into her yard (the human is NOT happy about it and was asking advice). She said the dog got pretty clawed up the first time or two, but rapidly began to take less damage in the encounters and now kills the cats without getting a scratch – chillingly, he’s become good at it.
I have seen dogs kill cats and it isn’t pretty. I have never seen a cat kill a dog. Cats have an an almost supernatural appeal to some people because they seem so elusive and unpredictable but that is a big part of the problem with this. Domestic cats are fundamentally stupid and disorganized beings with ADD and they don’t have the help of a pack. A housecat could kill a puppy or even a few of them if it wanted and the mother weren’t around but that would just be a sick experiment that doesn’t happen much in (suburban) nature.
Pound for pound, almost any breed of dog has the brains, the composure, and strength to keep from getting killed by a domestic cat. There are mentally unstable, sociopathic dogs as well and they do it better than cats in the same weight class. A rat terrier could finish off an entire feline shelter before breakfast and come back wanting more a few hours later.
This all seems to be avoiding the real question if we aren’t allowed to test it scientifically. Who would win in a fight, Batman or Spiderman?
Cats are built to kill things smaller than them. They have sharp claws and teeth. Dogs have stronger jaws and the muscles power their head. A cat would scratch the shit out of a dog, while the dog clamps down on the cat with his jaws and shakes the shit out of it.
If I had a choice of being the dog getting clawed, or the cat getting the shit shook out of it, I’d rather be the dog.
I had a big Tom once. A much larger strange dog came into our yard (this was a farm) and I was going to go out and shoo it away. The cat was inside with me but had seen the dog from the window. As soon as I opened the door, the cat flew out and attached itself to the dog’s face. Think the face-hugger from Alien. The dog was running backwards while trying to get turned around at the same time so for a while he was actually running sideways. It was comical. The cat was hanging on with his fore-claws and raking the dog’s face with his hind-claws. As the dog was leaving the yard, the cat calmly ad gracefully dropped off and trotted back towards me with his tail proudly erect. He got Tender Vittles (his favorite) for dinner that night.
Granted, the cat had the element of surprise so in a different situation the dog’s sheer size would likely win out. But size being equal, say a 100 pound Mountain Lion vs. a 100 pound Wolf, I would put money on the cat. Or without bringing wild animals into it, how about a twenty pound tom-cat vs a twenty pound beagle? I would still have to go with the cat.
So that cat is at least one advantage in that it can climb. Although I see this ending up as cat staying as far away as possible from the dog, hissing and spitting and the dog going mad beneath it.
Then it’d be aggression / exhaustion – is that cat aggressive / stupid enough to give up it’s safe position and attack the dog. Is the dog stupid enough to tire itself out and let the cat take a swing.
In a fair fight any reasonable size dog would beat a cat fairly easily. I think the cage helps that cat. Probably only enough to drag out the inevitable.
Although it depends on the dog, any of the dogs I grew up with would take one scratch from the cat and then cower in the corner whimpering. We had a Rottweiler that was afraid of one of our rabbits because it once caught him with a good swipe right on the nose.
I think the key here is that the cat was on its own territory and the dog on unfamiliar territory, and if the cat had entered into the dog’s yard, the situation would have been reversed. In that scenario the dog would have had a reason to defend itself.
I’ve also been trying to find the average size of a pet dog, but there are too many variables to consider. I still stand by my OP, that in general, dogs will win against cats because in general dogs are against cats. But you can’t generalize it since you could have, for example, a very large tom cat against a small chihuahua puppy, in which case the cat will undoubtedly have an advantage.
Batman, hands down. Now, if he were fighting Spider-Man …
As to the OP, it depends on the dog. My 12 pound Jack Russell killed several stray cats until they stopped coming into the yard. She instinctively knows what to do (Assume am aggressive stance, wait for an opening, dash in, grab the throat and shake until dead.) No cat as yet has ever laid a glove on her.