Snagglepuss the cat and Bubbles the baby rabbit

October 17, 2014 • 1:33 pm

by Matthew Cobb

This was posted on YouTube way back in the days of steam-powered black and white TV (like in, ooh, 2009). So Bubbles will now be a big rabbit. It garnered about 15,000 hits, at a time when that was LOTS. [EDIT: I have now traced it back to 2008 on a dead AOL video page…] It just popped up in Tina’s FB feed, so here you are, the lovely tail of Snagglepuss the cat and Bubbles the baby rabbit.

As I biologist I can work out why the cat would pick up the baby rabbit (right size, maybe mewing noises and maybe not too weird a smell). But what about the rabbit kit (that’s the term)? Mother rabbits normally feed their offspring for about 2-4 minutes *a day*. So they have a very powerful nipple search pheromone which enables the kits to find and latch onto their mother, and which isn’t even shared by hares (I presume they have their own). I don’t know of any equivalent pheromone in cats, and certainly cat mothers are a lot  more attentive about their babies (they don’t have burrows). So how did Bubbles cope with a) cat milk b) frequent provision of food and c) no rabbit nipple search pheromone?

PS The ‘tail’ thing was a joke.

10 thoughts on “Snagglepuss the cat and Bubbles the baby rabbit”

  1. I had a cat who would find wild baby rabbits and play kitten with them. She would wash them and tuck them in close to nurse. There was no milk, she hadn’t had kittens of her own for years. It was just maternal instinct, baby bunnies are cute so you do cute things with them.
    Then she got bored with the game and nommed them.

    1. Ouch! That last line caught me by surprise, even though I was half-expecting it…

      1. The first time I saw her with a bunny I thought ‘Oh, isn’t that sweet!’
        Until the game changed. When she started that thing that Darwin mentioned I rushed out to save the rabbit but it was too late, it was too badly injured to be saved. Taking it away from her just made matters worse though, she had already found the warren and just went back and got another one so I was just increasing the global pain by interfering.
        Cats, like people, are only loveable if you ignore the less delicate things they do.

        1. Yeah. ‘Lovable’ and ‘cute’ are human sentiments which we like to project on other life-forms.

          But I still like cats.

          1. Loveable and cute are universal sentiments. The cat wouldn’t have played ‘baby’ with the bunny if she hadn’t responded to its cuteness. I’m sure there was some oxytocin running round her brain in response to the trigger in the form of the bunny’s face.
            Other animals have the same emotions as we do, they just don’t have our powers of confabulation to explain them.
            Having read some Antonio Domasio I realized that the warning against anthropomorphizing animals is mistaken. They really are like us.

          2. Having read some Antonio Domasio I realized that the warning against anthropomorphizing animals is mistaken. They really are like us.

            Are you listening, Diana. 🙂

    2. Then she got bored with the game and nommed them.

      Name of Medea, by any chance?

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