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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

Your cat doesn't feed itself and is artificially selected to hunt for fun which skews this comparison a lot more than just the physical size.

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Tigers eat grass and small animals like termites just like domesticated cats do so I don't think their diet has been selected for as much as you think. They more likely became popular as pets because of what they eat.

Avoid evolutionary arguments, they're "just so" explanations that can be twisted to fit any narrative.

I didn't say the diets were selected, just that a domestic cat can afford to be habitually inefficient in a way most wild animals can't and that we have selectively bred cats for some of this. Yes, big predators will opportunistically eat smaller prey, it doesn't affect the claim that a domesticated cat is a poor starting point for the comparison you were making.

> Tigers eat grass

Tigers, and housecats, don't have the digestive system to get sustenance from grass. A cat swallowing grass is kind of like a chicken swallowing gravel; it's not food.

If tigers could eat grass as opposed to just swallowing it, they would have no reason to hunt anything; they're more than capable of driving away most things that would compete for their grass.

Fun fact: Chickens actually need to swallow gravel in order to digest any food since they don't have teeth. They store gravel in their gizzard and when the gizzard moves, the food is ground with any grit material inside. Once ground to a paste it can _then_ pass through the digestive tract. So definitely a component of food for chickens, unlike grass for tigers.

That's like saying that chewing is a component of food for humans (and everything else).

Chewing is an important way to increase the amount of nutrition you get from a fixed amount of food. It isn't itself food.

>Tigers eat grass

Lol. Yeah, they eat grass and then vomit it out. Just like my cats do. Helps them relieve themselves of furballs.

(Cats are only partly domesticated and feral cats certainly manage to feed themselves.)

Yeah but I bet feral cats don't feed themselves on flies unless they have no other options. It's not efficient.

In case your interested in more light reading on this: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/are-cats...

> Cats have us do everything for them. We clean their litter, stroke them, admire them, but, unlike dogs, they do not have to constantly please and satisfy our needs.

It seems like cats may have actually domesticated humans.

It is probably better to have a less losing strategy to hunt smaller pray, while searching for bigger? The marginal effort to catch a mouse can't be that high while roaming around searching for bigger pray?

I think you are underestimating the difficulty of catching a mouse.

I have hunting dogs and they can spend several hours going after a mouse, and their success rate isn't very good.

Plus, large animals are poorly Suited to hunt much smaller animals. Speed, momentum, and anatomy are not in your favor. Imagine driving a semi truck and trying to run over a mouse

Ye maybe you are right. I would not even try to catch a mouse by hand myself. And I have no clue how a lion would compare to a house cat in hunting a mouse.

But your dogs, do they hunt with their feet? I don't think dogs use their claws like cats do, making it really hard to get to the mouse? Like, dogs can't do a slap like cats and humans can?

Yes, dogs incapacitated prey with their mouths, and use their paws less.

That said, I think the bigger differences tho are momentum, distance, and turn radius. A tyranasaures head is something like 10ft off the ground. By the time it winds up and reaches the ground, the mouse would be long gone.

There are great documentary videos of large cats chasing desert rabbits that show this really well. The cats are bigger and faster and stronger, but the rabbits can turn faster.

Pumas have been observed to catch mice.

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