How does a cat prepare its food?

Immediately after the kill, a cat goes through the strange little routine of 'taking a walk'. Unless it is starving, it paces up and down for a while, as if feeling the need to release the tension of the huntand-kill sequence. Only then does it settle down to eating the prey.

This pause may be important for the cat's digestion, giving its system a chance to calm down after the adrenalin-excitement of the moments that have just passed. During this pause a prey that has been feigning death may try to escape and, on very rare occasions, succeeds in doing so before the cat can return to the hunting mood again.

When the cat finally approaches its prey to eat it, there is the problem of how to prepare it for easy swallowing. Small rodents cause no difficulties. They are simply eaten head first and the skins, if swallowed, are regurgitated later. Some cats separate out the gallbladder and intestines and avoid eating them, but others are too hungry to care and gobble down the entire animal without any fuss.

Birds are another matter because of their feathers, but even here the smaller species are eaten in their entirety, with the exception of tail and wing feathers. Birds the size of thrushes and blackbirds are plucked a little before eating, but then the cat impatiently starts its meal.

After a while it breaks off to remove a few more feathers, before eating further. It repeats this a number of times as the feeding proceeds.

Bigger birds, however, demand more systematic plucking, and if a cat is successful at killing a pigeon or something larger, it must strip away the feathers before it begins to eat.

To pluck a pigeon, a cat must first hold down the body of the bird with its front feet, seize a clump of feathers between its teeth, pull its jaw-clamped head upwards with some force, and then finally open its mouth and shake its head vigorously from side to side to remove any clinging plumage. As it shakes its head it spits hard and makes special licking-out movements with its tongue, trying to clear its mouth of stubbornly attached feathers. It may pause from time to time to lick its flank fur. This last action puts grooming into reverse.

Normally the tongue cleans the fur, but here the fur cleans the tongue.

Any last remnants are removed and then the next plucking action can take place.

The urge to pluck feathers from a large bird appears to be inborn. I once presented a dead pigeon to a wild cat living in a zoo cage where it had always been given chunks of meat as its regular diet. The cat became so excited at seeing a fully feathered bird that it started an ecstatic plucking session that went on and on until the whole body of the bird was completely naked. Instead of settling down to eat it, the cat then turned its attention to the grass on which it was sitting and began plucking that. Time and again it tugged out tufts of grass from the turf and shook them away with the characteristic bird-plucking movements until, eventually, having exhausted its long-frustrated urge to prepare its food, the cat finally bit into the flesh of the pigeon and began its meal. Clearly, plucking has its own motivation and can be frustrated by captivity, just like other, more obvious drives.

The strangest feature of feather-plucking is that Old World Cats perform it differently from New World Cats. All species from the first area perform a zigzag tugging movement leading to the full shake of the head, while those from the Americas tug the feathers out in a long vertical movement, straight up, and only then perform the sideways shake. It appears that, despite superficial similarities between the small cats from the two sides of the Atlantic, they are in reality two quite distinct groups.