http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1190772/What-squeak-Daring-mouse-whos-boss-scares-leopard-steals-lunch.html

---

If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.
~ Gensha, Zen Master

It seems that well-fed cats have little interest in killing.

When we still had our own kitties off-leash, they often brought their captures into the house (through the milk chute) and let them go. It really annoyed the heck out of us ....... birds trying to fly off, mice scampering away into some little niche, not to be seen again for the longest time.

The ultimate "insult" was when I took the female cat down in the basement to CATCH a mouse that I saw running around down there. She went up to the durned thing and they sniffed noses! That really pissed me off. What good are cats in the house if they won't even contribute to keeping it mouse free?

-Vince

How did the mouse know the cat wasn't gonna pounce?

---

If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.
~ Gensha, Zen Master

I reckon that once she caught it, brought it inside and released it, the mouse must have "realized" it was now the kitty's pet. Since the kitty hadn't killed it, (maybe hadn't even actually hurt it) the mouse figured that the only way to survive in these new and alien surroundings was to be totally submissive.

We humans do essentially the same thing in similar situations, don't we? We might fight an enemy but once we're taken prisoner, we become very submissive to avoid being hurt.

-Vince

... the leopard sensed that something just wasn't right with the rat. For instance, dogs can sniff out cancerous tissue, and they can sense abnormal electrical (electromagnetic?) activity in epileptics about to have a seizure, too. So, given that even human observers noted the rat's obvious unusual behavior (i.e., it neither tried to scamper away nor play dead when confronted with an otherwise mortal enemy many times its own size), maybe kitty said something similar to a comment I made in another post elsewhere ... "Hey, this looks pretty good." + [Sniff] + "OMG ... Eeewww!" + "Dude, that's just E-V-I-L sick!"

I mean, perhaps like humans, some creatures might also be aware of the fact that what one eats can become part of what one is. I don't have any references, but I remember reading several years ago that studies have shown that behaviors and perhaps even memories can be transferred from one animal (I think it was rats being studied, not sure) to another upon the one (rat) being fed and eating the brain of another (rat). So, yeah, it might be the case that the leopard noticed something whacko about that otherwise bite-sized snacko and therefore said "No thanks!" and just walked away.

To say the least, if one blinds oneself to its inclinations toward brutality, Animalia is a most curious place to explore. But, it is quite dangerous, too ... sadly human-like in many ways. Indeed, I think there's much the camera eye of humans tends to gloss over and not see, and lots the ear never hears, about either domain ... and the sometimes shocking relatedness 'tween the two.


Don (now disengages from theorizing how minds of a cartoonish cat and mouse might differ)

amongst all living creatures, including humans ....

In the face of threat, if you don't react with animosity or fear and you hold the same feelings internally with integrity .... the aggressor becomes baffled and doesn't know exactly what to do and will therefore, probably not attack.

As a youngster, I'd often heard advice about bear attacks .... that the best defense was just to be still. Maybe fall to the ground and roll up into a ball. I'd also heard that dogs can "smell fear" and will attack if they sense fear.

One day, I had the opportunity to check out the latter theory!~ A cousin and I were scrounging around in a vast car dump for parts for our respective cars, one late summer's evening. Now, in our opinion, we weren't stealing anything because these cars had been brought to this site by owners, as the result of a newly implemented govt. inspection program after their vehicles had been inspected and failed to pass. It was a recycling plant that crushed and sold cars for scrap. The plant had recently suffered an explosion in their equipment and was thereby crippled and shut down and couldn't process the carcasses and so cars were being piled up in a backlog for several acres, outside of the plant's own fence.

We scrounged for sometime but couldn't find certain tires we wanted and so we decided to go through a small hole in the fence into the main yard. After some time, we still hadn't located any good tires and were about to leave the yard, looking for a different exit point. Suddenly we found ourselves being intercepted by a couple of huge Doberman dogs coming at us full tilt, from the yard's administration shack!

My cousin looked at me in a panic and asked, "what do we do?!"

I remembered the advice I'd heard and -coupled with a few other small incidents of personal experience as a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman- I said, "Just be very calm. They can smell fear so don't let yourself get scared. Keep talking to me as though we're workers. Don't look at them directly. Just kind of ignore them and don't move away."

They came right up to us, barking their fool heads off in a menacing fashion and we just stood there and kept talking in low voices to each other. I gave the dogs a quick firm glance, nodding my head to them to acknowledge their presence but then turned back and talked to my cousin again.

In about 30 seconds, the dogs were quite confused, turned around and ran back to the shack. Then we sidled off, found our hole and got the heck OUT of there!!~

-Vince