I’ve heard that’s true of wild weasels, but can’t find a reputable cite at the moment better than a shitload of personal anecdotes from backyard chicken owners.
Dogs descend from wolves. Some dog breeds still have high prey drive, like Huskies (I have one, he’s gone after foxes, rabbits, squirrels and skunks). They’be been known to tear apart smaller dogs for seemingly no reason.
Well, dogs are dogs. They are a predator species, or at least derived from a predator species. Given a tempting opportunity, like a baby squirrel, the primal drive kicks in for many dogs. That’s true ten times over if there is more than one dog (pack hunting drive). Lots of people are stunned to find that their three lolloping uberfriendly labradors left at large killed a whole flock of their neighbors’ sheep. Happens every day though.
As far as “killing for sport” – well, tapping into your primal drives is very rewarding, folks. If it wasn’t extremely enjoyable to hunt down and kill prey, wolves would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago. Mostly they can’t indulge in pointless murder, because hunting is an enormously difficult enterprise, if your prey has evolved right along with you to be almost but not quite impossible to catch. But given easy prey like small livestock, it’s very likely to be a happy bloodbath.
Cats “play” with their prey is for a very different reason. As a rule, obligate carnivores such as felids cannot afford to get injured, especially solo predators. They will starve if not at optimal agility. Cats are not very strong, either. So the batting around of a live mouse is to bewilder and weaken it until it can be safely killed without the possible fatal occurrence of a rodent bite wound. A terrier of comparable size is capable of grabbing a mouse and swallowing it whole, or breaking a rat’s back with a quick shake of its neck. Cats can’t do that.
Domestic cats which get regular meals don’t hunt from hunger, but from instinct. They have varying amounts of that, like dogs. Cats also learn to hunt from their mothers, so there’s another place for things to break down and only pieces of the hunting drive to be displayed.
As for whether cat owners want them to kill things? Dunno. I’m not a cat person and their destruction of songbirds – they are one of the largest factors in the documented plummeting of songbird populations – is one of the biggest reasons. But cats, unlike dogs, reproduce mainly without human selection. So, if someone wanted to breed hunting instinct out of cats they would have a hard time making inroads.
Lots of rural citizens keep barn cats to reduce the rodent population there, a function cats have served for thousands of years and are about as good at as they ever were. Those people certainly do want those cats to kill things.
“obligate carnivores”?
Obligate carnivores absolutely must eat meat; they can’t get by on vegetation. If you’re not an obligate carnivore, you can get by without meat.
Our prior dog had a strong jaw and was able to rip open any plush toy within a few minutes in search of the “squeak” mechanism, to which she would chew into small, plastic bits.
I am not sure how much of an authority Caesar Milan is considered these days, but I remember seeing an episode of his a few years ago where he explained why dogs like squeaky toys. His explanation was that the squeaky toys resemble the squeak of a rodent as it is being crushed in the dog’s jaws. Watching that video from the OP lends credence to that thought. It seems domesticated dogs still may harbor some of that “kill” instinct, but can be satisfied via artificial means.
You actually went out of your way for a customized gif without a cite.
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SmartAleq, you actually put more effort into being snarky than it would have taken to answer the question. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
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