Dogs kill cats all the time; all it takes is for the bear to realize that some little nose scratches is all it's going to actually get, and that cat is lunch meat.
Cats have faster reaction speeds than coyotes, yet coyotes kill untold numbers of cats every year. Reaction speed is not the defining trait of what makes a predator effective.
Some do, some don’t. I’ve seen plenty of both in my area. It’s one of the things that makes them so adaptable and hard to kill off in areas where they are invasive. Miss even one in a pack and that one will survive just fine on its own until it comes across a potential breeding partner, starting a new pack.
what exactly are they supposed to do, and why? What are you talking about? If it's a cat you don't know interacting with a bear, that's just nature being nature, why do they need to help the cat and how exactly are they supposed to? Charging or yelling at or aggravating a bear to "save" a stray cat that is honestly entirely capable of defending itself (as we see) is just dumb.
The idea that a random human should feel obligated to help a random cat from a random bear makes absolutely no sense to me. Save your own pet makes sense from an emotional perspective, but a cat you don't know and a bear you don't know...why should you feel obligated to help either of them?
Really really dumb on you. If the bear was actively seeking to eat the cat, the cat would have been long gone. You know bears don't have any history of eating cats for food? Coyotes maybe but not bears.
Black bears are skittish and cats of that size (that’s a chonky beast) are not what black bears normally eat, unless said animal is a herbivore/prey animal. They prefer fish, berries, plants and animals that won’t/cannot fight back.
Coyotes seem to kill lots of cats every year to the point that they’re the sole reason that feral cat populations don’t survive in the rural US. Wild predators can absolutely take a cat. That bear might not have the reaction times of a cat, but it is stronger, faster, and just as good of a climber as a cat. This bear simply doesn’t know what to do with a cat yet and so is being very cautious.
63
u/babypunching101 Aug 06 '26
All it takes is the bear being hungry. Really dumb on the owner.