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Comment by snickell | Hacker News Reader

Curiously, I have a cat Brownie who grew up feral in the high sierras and appears to have subsisted on snakes as food/prey. They're still his favorite prey.

Instead of startling, Brownie the mighty snake hunter reacts to cucumbers as: FAVORITE FOOD.

He gets a cucumber almost every day. He hunts the cucumbers, drags them to his lair, and consumes them leaving only a small trail of seed viscera behind in his cave.

He's been doing this before I knew about cucumbers scaring cats on internet, and I think lends credence to the hypothesis that cucumbers trigger a "snake recognition circuit": a cat raised to see snakes as food rather (vs the inborn threat response) reacts to cucumbers as food!

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Ha! Those recognition circuits are real. For us it was birds (quail). They were terrified of rolling balls -- basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, you name it, if they saw it roll they would make a special "emergency honk" and the entire group would freeze for the next minute. We had never seen that reaction before even though we raised them from eggs. They didn't ever do that as a reaction to people, they didn't do it in response to the neighborhood cat, and they didn't do it with explosions on TV (they quite liked those, actually). It was by far the strongest fear reaction we ever saw from them.

It took us a while to figure out why: it was probably a bird-of-prey detection circuit looking for gliding motion.

That cats have a natural snake recognition circuit is news to me. Several more anecdotes:

A feral cat that gave birth in a family member's garage in east San Diego (not the sierras but mountainous at ~3k ft elevation) found a rattle snake on their property one time. I had to scare her away several times while running around looking for a bucket and some long sticks because she did not recognize the danger at all. It looked more like she was approaching a strange new male cat that was about to court her than a venomous snake

Regarding the cucumbers: another family member had a cat in Europe in a village around 56°N - which is near the upper limit for snakes, so he's unlikely to have ever seen any, let alone eaten one - and the cat loved cucumbers. They had a greenhouse and had to be extremely vigilant after picking cucumbers because the second they'd turn their backs the cat would proceed to take nibbles out of every single one of them in turn, even if he was given one of his own. I think your cat just likes cucumbers.

Similarly have a lifelong memory of my cat when I was ~10 years old coming out of the woods with a 2-3ft snake sticking out of both ends of his mouth, proudly walking to the house with it.. and my mom screaming at him to put it down!

> "cat would proceed to take nibbles out of every single one of them in turn",

Interesting, although I suggest it much more likely that this cat also really is triggering some kind of "snake recognition circuit", it seems to be driven by some desire to make sure each cucumber is "dead". If it were only about liking cucumbers you would expect it to gobble down the nearest delicious thing it sees, which in my own observation of the felis catus, this is their default behavior when there is favored food and no danger present, they tend to act like greedy vultures, though it differs from cat to cat.

> though it differs from cat to cat.

That's the problem: people are extrapolating species-wide behavior from a tiny sampling of an animal with high variability. Some feral sisters have set up shop on a family member's property and given birth to several litters so at this point I've got experience with two dozen cats over my lifetime. The natural variability in personality I've observed in three month old kittens raised in the same environment by two biological sisters (who themselves have vastly different personalities), is staggering. I have no freaking clue where people get most of their cat stereotypes.

> If it were only about liking cucumbers you would expect it to gobble down the nearest delicious thing it sees

Why? I can't imagine anyone in my family eating a cucumber after a cat has bitten it for sanitary reasons so I expect he quickly learned that the more cucumbers he nibbled on the more he got (these are home grown cucumbers, not the giant monstrosities in US supermarkets, so he'd want more than one).

For memetic reasons I immediately wondered if the same cognitive apparatus might be repurposed to identify hotdogs. No doubt specific areas of the brain are electrically involved, and monitorable via electrodes or more invasive probes. This suggests an opportunity to bring to market an efficient, self-cleaning, content filter engine employing a redundant array of cats; then further observe that caudal repositioning is an output property of tensor cats, making such an array the perfect vehicle to unlock the broader field of Feline Learning, with obvious opportunities for tail optimisation at runtime and dinner time.

It's not that cats are scared of cucumbers. It's that the cucumber is secretly placed close behind them while they're eating and vulnerable. It's like startling a person by sneaking up on them. That doesn't mean they're scared of you. They're just surprised.

That's a cool story. Props to Brownie, but I hope he's fast enough to avoid being bitten by the few poisonous ones in the US.

In Africa, most of the storks ate snakes; including really deadly ones. They would stomp them to death. That would probably not work on pit vipers.

>In Africa, most of the storks ate snakes; including really deadly ones. They would stomp them to death.

my pet goose does this as well with anything remotely snake-shaped.

She's used to it now, but she used to do the same hopping-dance every time she'd encounter a garden hose.

hop hop hop with her wings out to appear bigger while quickly snapping at the 'victim' with her beak and then darting to caution with her head while keeping her distance from it otherwise and continuing the stomp dance.

must just be a bird thing (the dance, not the anti-snake behavior), I have my doubts that her soft webbed-feet would do anything but perhaps scare an actual snake.

Our cat, who had never seen a real snake, was hunting "snakes" - my hand in cobra position or rubber/plastic toy snakes - in very distinctive "mongoose" like style - cautiously moving around and ultimately making a lighning fast jump just a bit from a side and biting the "snake" right below the "head". When it were a "standing cobra" - my hand wrapped in several layers of cloth for protection - the bite would be right below the palm, a very strong bite with the cat simultaneously wrestling my hand to the ground using his whole body.

I don't think there are any poisonous cucumbers in the us, his cat should be fine.

Some common foods like grapes are poisonous to cats (for unknown reasons), there might be some tube-shaped vegetables too.

Has anyone worked out how cats react to vampire watermelons?

I dunno. When I was a kid, they would freak me out...

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