Cat videos are swamping the internet. Search on YouTube for ‘cats’ and you’ll get 11.3 million hits. Fat cats, cute cats, ugly cats, cartoon cats: we can’t get enough of them. Any enterprising puss that could film and upload its own home movies would be an instant internet sensation. Horizon: The Secret Life Of the Cat (BBC2) revealed the science that might make this possible. In the Surrey commuter-belt village of Shamley Green, 50 pet moggies were fitted with GPS trackers that pinpointed their position to within a few centimetres as they prowled on their nightly rounds. The most adventurous were given tiny collar-cameras to wear, offering viewers a cats-eye view of the world. The cats were very much the focus of the programme: we didn’t learn their owners’ names. Instead, we met Ginger, who repeatedly snuck into his neighbour’s garden at 4am to fight the resident cat. Phoebe and Kato worked out a “timeshare” of their territory so they were never patrolling at the same time. There was Claude, who crept into a stranger’s house each night to steal food; and Molly, who travelled two hours from home to hunt from a birds’ nest in a wood. The documentary contained few surprises. Cats, as their owners already guessed, like to sneak through next-door’s cat-flap and raid the food bowl; they hiss and yowl and then scarper when they meet one another; hunting mice is, mostly, too much trouble for them. |
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