The good news is you can help protect your chicks by being vigilant and aware of the danger. The smaller the prey is, the more likely a cat is to attack. Chicks are highly vulnerable and cats love to go for them and will score a kill almost every, single time. Your number one concern if you have both chickens and cats is protecting your chicks. That means no one-on-one duels between cats and large, evenly matched chickens! Instead, cats will either go after easy prey (chicks) or, sometimes, set up an ambush where they can take down a chicken from ambush without much of a struggle. They only reason they won’t is because they know that a given chickens has a better chance against them than something small and truly helpless like a mouse.Īs much as they love to hunt and seem to relish in the kill, cats are savvy predators that don’t like to take risks and fight fair. Know that even if your cats have been raised around chickens, they will still possess an urge to hunt them down. In fact, some folks argue that cats aren’t truly domesticated at all! Note that, unlike some dogs, the predatory instincts of cats remains highly acute: it never goes away or even recedes just because they live with humans or around other animals. Cats are highly adept ambush predators, and well-equipped for taking down prey with minimal fuss or effort. Cats are Predators, but Don’t Want a Fair FightĪs far as cats go, pretty much everyone knows that they are superb hunters. To do that, we’ll need to understand the predator in question. This means you’ll be responsible for preventing and, if needed, heading off any attacks that might occur. They just bring something out in other animals that activates their prey drives. If a meat-eating predator is around, including predators that we have domesticated in the form of dogs and cats, your chickens are never truly safe. They are just too delicious to be left alone apparently. This means that dogs, coyotes, wolves, foxes, badgers, weasels, snakes, hawks, rats, bears, alligators and, yes, cats see your chickens as potential snacks. To fully understand this problem, you need to understand something right up front: damn near all predatory animals consider chickens to be food. You may have heard the horror stories of cats attacking chickens or even vice versa but with some understanding, planning and proper safety measures in place, you can help ensure that your homestead remains cat-astrophe-free!īad puns aside, below I will discuss the potential risks associated with keeping chickens and cats together, as well as what you can do to reduce those risks so that you keep your sanity and your chickens keep their lives. Cats are highly likely to go for young chicks, and attacks on adult chickens are also possible. It seems like an obviously bad idea, but is it? Will your cats attack chickens? Especially when cats and chickens are involved. Think about it: cats love to kill birds, chickens are birds. They are such incredibly adaptable hunters that they are more successful than most predators.The fur, and sometimes feathers, will fly! There is hardly any arrangement I can think of that would cause more trouble than keeping both cats and chickens. Servals are generalists, meaning they do not specialize in just one kind of prey. Instead of using speed to chase down their prey, like a serval, servals are primarily ambush predators and use those long legs to leap, grab birds in the air or grab a mouse from an underground burrow. Servals have the largest ears for the size of their body so can hunt for rodents in the grass by using their hearing, locating it in the grass or underground. These long legs also enable them to leap 6-8 feet into the air to capture a bird flying low.
These long legs raise the cats’ body above water as they stand in ponds and watering holes to catch fish. Servals have very tall legs- the longest legs proportionately to their body size of all cats.
They are absent from the central tropical rainforests and the deserts in the north and south west.įUN FACTS | Servals are very shy small cats found in Africa, most closely related to the caracal. RANGE | It is rare in North Africa and the Sahel, but widespread in wetter habitats throughout sub-Saharan countries.
0 kommentar(er)
