Unusually quiet on the forums front. Might as well watch a couple of videos ...

Family cat races to rescue 4-year-old boy from dog attack

OK, I'll bite, pun intended & send in the cats! I saw that video too, after coming across it and skipping it (as it is there aren't enough hours in the day), until my better half expressed her amazement at the clip. Assuming it's genuine (not that I have reason to think otherwise), I now share her amazement. My limited experience with cats (we've had 5, including the current 2) tells me they tend to run & hide with anything new or unexpected happening around them. Perhaps the cat in the clip was familiar with the dog, but even so her reaction was totally unexpected to me. I now wonder when we'll see it in sales promotions for security cam systems...

As one who deals professionally with cats every day, the behavior is not atypical. Cats can be much more territorial* (vis-à-vis living space and their people) than dogs — and that is nowhere better evidenced than in the security videos; the interview with the family pretty well sets out the parameters of the cat's protective behavior.

I like it. I like it a lot.

* You'll note that the cat not only attacked the dog but then chased it to the edge of the property. Cats very quickly acquire a sense of property limits which they will generally defend: neutered cats will defend home turf with zeal; intact males very often aggrandize larger areas as their domain.

If you haven't read it, I recommend the following, a wonderful memoir in which the author describes an episode where her blind cat aggressively defends her against an intruder in the middle of the night (and virtually all of his escapades are astounding):
Homer's Odyssey : A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned about Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat (Gwen Cooper, 2009).

Several years ago my son was awakened in the middle of the night by his cat's yowling. He went downstairs to find a burglar half in his living room window desperately trying to back out while the cat was attacking the burglar with teeth and claws. The burglar escaped but the cat spent the rest of the night prowling through the apartment growling and snarling and her hair standing on end to make herself appear larger.

As an aside, the cat's best buddy was our 160 pound bull-mastiff. Every time they were together the cat would run up, winding through the mastiffs legs and purring.

That makes two of us. The entire action, including the 'shortcut' the cat took to follow up on its first charge was nothing shy of decisive.

It's not that I never heard of cat territorialism, I just haven't seen obvious examples of it myself. Our cats (neutered males) are indoor/outdoor cats, and prowl the neighborhood, a.o. keeping the rabbit, mole, vole and field mice populations in check. The older one (13 y) a red tabby at just about 10 pounds, and a younger (4y) grey/yellow tabby of about 18 pounds, of which our vet suspects a healthy dose of Maine Coon in his genetic make-up. When someone walks up to the front or back door they freeze, and when the doorbell rings or the door opens they scramble toward the basement in a mad, cartoon-like dash.

But they aren't shrinking violets either. They occasionally fight/play among themselves, and otherwise get injured outside, as measured by gashes in skin/fur, chipped canines & the like. We whistle and call before we go to bed to get them indoors, and they almost always respond and return home. If not, there are ample hiding places around the house, a preferred one of which is on top of the open garage door, accessed via the cars parked there. After rainstorms we briefly wonder what the cat prints are doing on the windshield.

I'm usually more a cat person than a dog person, but a nod to the dogs is worthwhile here: One of my girlfriends' other girlfriend was attacked on the street a couple months back. Someone tried to grab her and drag her into a car. She had her 4-month-old poodle puppy with her, and the puppy went absolutely nuts, attacking the man and driving him off, biting him several times in the process.

Police responded to her 911 call and came right away. They took samples from the puppy's mouth--the puppy drew blood on the attacker--and were able to get DNA from the samples that led them to arrest the attacker.