I hooked up my computer so when an e-mail arrived, it made a noise like a rooster crowing. That was fine, whenever the computer crowed, the cat would run around looking for the rooster.
But- our cat is a suburban cat and wouldn’ have seen or heard a chicken in its life. How does it know that the strange screeching sound belongs to something that is good to eat?
:smack:
Is it possible that your cat, upon hearing a strange noise, came not neccessarily to eat, but to investigate?
I don’t think my cat would have the energy to investigate anything it couldn’t eat.
The cat came to see if whatever was making the noise might possibly be something edible. Cats are like that, you know. All noises are potentially food-noises.
I’ve a nice recording of a wolf howling. Playing it is quite effective at getting the cat to hide under the sofa.
Cats can probably distinguish between bird sounds and predator sounds without needing to know the exact species.
I’m convinced that cats have the capacity to recognize “bird-ness” even when it’s present in a fairly abstract form. As a kid I was impressed by our cat’s violent reaction to a crow hand puppet on the TV: he got up on his hind legs and began swatting at the screen. It didn’t look anything like a real crow, but somehow it got a rise out of the cat in a way that other moving objects on the TV didn’t.
Sadly, this only worked a few times before the cat got bored with it and kept sleeping. However, I now have the sound of a cow mooing- which gets absolutely no reaction whatsoever.
The degree to which anything will activate a cat’s predatory instincts, I think, varies widely from cat to cat.
I had a cat once who wouldn’t know what to do with a mouse if you threw one at him, but the sight of Super Mario, bounding across the TV screen, drove the kitty nuts…
Maybe he was expecting some important e-mail…
Someone gave one of my kitties a stuffed cow that mooed. Maxx had to kill it at least once a day, and of course, whenever it mooed.