WHY CATS PURR

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 June 1923, Page 7

WHY CATS PURR

AN OLD-TIME INSTINCT.

Pussy, stretched before a cosy fire and purring loudly, while she kneads the hearthrug with her claws, suggests the very embodiment of domestic comfort, declares E. Kay Robinson in the “Daily Mail”; but what instinct is it which impels the whole tribe of cals when they are happy to make that curious noise, as though breathing through some impediment in the throat, and at the same time to extend and contract their claws? Thousands of children of successive generations have asked their elders this question, getting only confessions of blank ignorance or equivocations in reply. Rare chance brought understanding to the writer at a cheetah hunt in India. Toilsome miles of jolting in a springless cart over a rough plain had brought the party at last within the cheetah’s range of a herd of black buck antelopes. 1 The great cat was unhoded, and with superb craft it dropped from the off-side of the moving cart and for a few yards crept beside the revolving wheel till a little ridge of sand hid it from the antelopes. Here it stopped, while the cart went on and its occupants watched the cheetah creep to the ridge and, peeping over gather itself for the fatal rush. In three magnificent bounds it reached the scattering herd and struck down a fine young buck. The whole party ran to the kill, and while the shikaris were busy with their routine I watched the beast of prey. The buck, with broken neck, was dying, and the cheetah, with teeth fixed in its throat, was breathing hard through the stream of blood it

drank, compelling it to make a loud purring noise with every breath; and when the flow of blood slackened its strong claws, grasping the victim’s chest, spread wide and contracted alternately, kneading the heart, as it were, to force out the last jets of blood. In a flash the vision of puss at home, purring loudly as she kneaded the hearthrug, arose in the mind, and one understood the instinct which impels even a domestic cat, when happy, to reproduce sounds and actions sympolical of the happiest moments in its wild ancestors’ lives. The cat on the hearthrug may never have killed even a mouse, and is probably too well fed to be thinking even of meat and milk, but the old instinct still works.