Darwinian Kittehs

I was eating a tuna sandwich earlier today. It was just chunks of hickory-smoked tuna thrown down on some olive oil mayo between two slices of bread. And my younger cat, who has never had tuna to my knowledge, began sniffing the air with that "What is this glorious scent?" expression.

Pretty soon he zeroed in on me sitting on my ass, propped up against my headboard by a ridiculous amount of pillows, and was right there at the plate.

The weird thing about Malkin is that he will usually come and investigate my food, but when I try to share the appropriate tidbits he'll just bat them around and then leave them where they lie. Which irks me no end.

But today he gladly accepted the tidbits of tuna proferred, so then I broke off larger chunks and threw them into his bowl and he chowed down.

But the question is, "How did Malkin intuitively know that tuna is something his body wanted?"

I think we have only to think in a Darwinian manner and realize that this means cats once lived in the ocean.

And obviously they were once great tuna hunters. They must have been very successful at bringing down the big game tuna.

I wish I had an illustrator to help me do a small children's book (I visualize it as about twelve or fourteen pages) in which these Tuna-Hunting Cats of the Jurassic (or whatever period that would be) would be shown swimming and hunting alongside ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and giant sharks.

I looked to see if I could find any vestiges of webbing between Malkin's claws and I'm happy to say I think I saw those there. (Okay, they were just traces, a soupcon of webbing.)

We have only to wait for the discovery of the fossils of prehistoric swimming cats at this point for verification of my hypothesis, but I'm confident that will happen soon.