You might have seen ‘Tom and Jerry’ in your childhood, the cartoon that showed the comedic relation between the cat and the mice with a moral lesson. In this cat and mouse story, they used to show a frenemy sort of relation between the cat, mouse, and the dog.
Have you ever wondered how these animals interact in real life and are they frenemies in real life?
Do Cats and Mice Get Along Well?
Cats and mice can never be friends in real life. Mice are one of the cat’s most favorite prey. If you own a domestic cat, you won’t have to worry about mice as your cat will take care of them. Also, to share its success with you, it will bring the dead mice to you, as this is a sign of cats acknowledging you as one of them. This might be creepy for you but this is a very friendly gesture for cats.
Mice do fear cats, as cats are their natural predators. Mice can also detect cats nearby through different senses and they can sense a cat’s urine and saliva, and once they detect it, this provokes a fight or flight reaction in mice as they try to escape.
However, if a cat is quite young and has been domesticated since its birth, it might not see mice as prey. Instead, it might start playing around with mice. It depends on the age of the cat that you are adopting. If your cat has grown enough to understand hunting, then you can expect it to prey upon mice and rats.
If it is unaware of hunting, it won’t be hunting down mice and they might be the kind of frenemies that you see in Tom and Jerry. However, in most cases, mice and cats don’t get along and cats see mice as their primary prey.
Do Dogs and Mice Get Along Well?
While mice are the primary prey of cats, they don’t share the same relation with dogs. While dogs do not cause any harm to mice and don’t see them as potential prey. However, according to research, mice avoid household pets and their activity around them decreases significantly. This stat shows that even though household dogs don’t harm mice and rats, mice are scared of them and try their best to avoid them. So, you won’t see them playing with your dog.
However, while dogs won’t prey upon mice, they might attack them if they get scared by it. This might cause the death of the mouse as dogs are more powerful than cats and use their bites for defense. So, even though dogs won’t hunt down mice, they might end up attacking them to defend themselves.
Many dogs get poisoned after attacking poisoned mice or eating the poisonous food that owners keep to get rid of mice. Therefore, if you own a dog, use other ways to get rid of rodents in your house to protect your dogs from such accidents.
Do Cats and Dogs Get Along Well?
This is something that made me question the credibility of the makers of Tom and Jerry. What made them think that cats and dogs share an abusive relationship? In the show, you can see the dog and Tom as enemies.
However, in reality, cats and dogs can be great friends. If a dog watches a kitten grow and has been around it for a long time, it will act as the protector of the cat. They will get so comfortable with each other that the cat might end up having a better relationship with your dog than it has with you.
However, their relationship might vary with the personality of both, the dog and the cat. In many cases, you can see dogs chasing cats or maybe even harm them. However, you have to understand that household dogs are not the enemies of cats, nor do they see them as their prey. Household dogs don’t prey on anything. If they attack an animal or a person, that is a defensive action on their end. This trait has nothing to do with cats, as dogs will attack anything that they consider threatening or dangerous.
On the other hand, owners that own both these animals share many dog and cat stories from their daily experience with them, and these stories indicate that if both these animals are treated and trained properly, they can get along very well. You can find many pet videos where dogs and cats share a very special bond and are best buddies. The rivalry between cats and dogs is purely a myth.
Dogs and cats share different personalities. While dogs are easily approachable and social, cats have a reserved and playful personality. Dogs can be emotional, while cats are just playful and have their way of showing affection towards their owners. This difference in personality trait doesn’t go down well with dogs and they can find cats rude, abusive, or threatening. While cats do not like people or animals who act over-friendly with them as they have a very reserved personality. If you get over-friendly with your cat, it will either bite you, slap you, or scratch you. While you understand this behavior, dogs see it as an attack from the cat and they retaliate, causing a fight between these two animals.
So, Can a Cat, a Dog and a Mouse Get Along?
Well, practically speaking, no. These three animals have very different traits. While a dog and cat might end up getting along if they are trained in such a way that they accept the differences in their respective personality traits, they won’t get along with mice.
Dogs might get scared of mice and will try to attack them as a form of defense, cats simply see mice as prey and will hunt them down and bring their carcass to you. Therefore, from this article, we can establish that when a cat, dog, and mouse share a room, the mouse will end up as the cat’s dinner rather than being its friend.
