Cats hunt even when they are not hungry
Domestic cats are obligate carnivores with a predator's neural wiring that does not switch off when a bowl of kibble is full. A 2013 study published in Nature Communications tracked free-roaming cats across the United States and found that they kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds and up to 22.3 billion small mammals annually. Pet cats with regular meals still hunt. The drive is not about caloric need. It is a fixed action pattern, a hardwired motor sequence that fires when triggered by the movement of prey, independent of hunger. This is the biological baseline everything else builds on.
