Your cat’s not broken if it can’t catch mice. Its personality is just too nice to kill

All house cats have the ability to be lethal predators, even if they never act like it − as can be seen in viral TikTok videos showing cats lazily look on at mice that would be easy targets, except the cat seems completely uninterested. The cats in the videos aren’t lazy or broken, they just have nicer personalities that lower their drive to kill, scientists say.

If a cat has a more pleasant personality − like if it is friendly with people and other cats − that could correlate with it catching less prey, said Emmanuelle Baudry, an ecologist and lead author of the study, “Pet cat personality linked to owner-reported predation frequency.”

“This is not cats being broken at all – this is cats being just fine and friendly, nice, wonderful pets,” Baudry told USA TODAY.

For years, scientists did not consider the different observable personalities in cats, Baundry and her co-authors wrote in their 2022 study. Only recently did biologists begin to hypothesize that a cat’s individual personality could correlate with its hunting tendencies, the authors said.
pending a lot more time studying cats and cat personalities, and kind of finding all the nuances to the behavior,” said Wailani Sung, a cat behaviorist who helped make the 2022 Netflix documentary Inside the Mind of a Cat.
All cats have ability to catch and kill

Unless your cat is very old or ill, it can instinctually stalk rodents and pounce at birds, Baudry said. Scientists have long observed that kittens do not need to be taught how to hunt, and that they’re born with the ability and knowledge to catch their own food, said Sung, who now works with the animal shelter Joybound People & Pets in Walnut Creek, California.