Don’t play with your food!

Human parents tell their kids not to play with their food. Cat parents don’t do so, and kittens do indeed play with the food served to them—or more precisely, try to kill it before eating it.

The predaceous instincts are so strong that even a very young kitten will sometimes pounce on a bowl of food, even though that food is about as “dead” as can be. The kitten seems to think that, since this is food, it has to be “killed” first. As they mature, kittens seem to learn that the food given by humans is not “prey” and doesn’t need to be attacked before being eaten.