Customer Reviews

The Secret Life of Cats

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The preview for this video leads you to believe that this a documentary about what your every day cat does when he or she itsoutside of the house. I was expecting to see shots of cats in your everyday neighborhoods exploring, hunting, fighting and socializing. As a recent cat owner, I was curious to know more about the behavior of regular domesticated cats.

Instead I was treated to a mostly (but not completely) negative portrayal of cats. While all of it is true, this documentary focused on the damage that mostly wild cats have in different parts of the world. I have nothing against the topic itself, it's just that this documentary is not sold as such. The preview is very misleading.

This is also not a documentary for those with weak stomachs. There are plenty of shots of injured and killed prey as well as of dead cats.

Overall it was an interesting overview of cats and their true predator instincts, but just not what I thought I was getting.

If you hate cats, you'll probably enjoy this documentary. It is very negative and assumes no cat owners have "come to terms with" the vicious predatory nature of their pets and need to be shown they are cruel creatures single handedly destroying all the ecosystems of the world and they must be stopped. You may read that and think I'm surely exaggerating, but I'm not. The documentary chose a less blunt way of phrasing it, but that is the clear message of this film. As evidence for this premise, they show us details about the cat who topped a survey as the most prolific hunter in the UK. They regale viewers with stories about her dozens of conquests and show all the poor, bloody mangled animals she's brought home which her owners have been saving in plastic bags for weeks (I don't even want to guess what their home smelled like with 30 or so corpses in open plastic bags in the pantry some more than a week old). They present it as wholesale slaughter of small defenseless creatures and then imply that this is typical of cats, when in fact, by their own admission, this particular cat by far outstripped the competition in a survey of 750 cats in the UK. How is that typical? Later in the film they show us footage of a cat being killed, skinned and cooked by aborigines in Australia. The slaughtered cat bore a striking resemblance to my own. I didn't enjoy that, folks, but thank you anyway. I'm not trying to discredit the negative impact cats could legitimately have on some ecosystems, but nobody has yet declared mice, voles, crickets and small lizards an endangered species around here. This documentary is very preachy, something I could look past, if I didn't find it also quite hypocritical. While it waxes passionate about "introduced species" and the need to protect nature from itself, I found it had little, if any respect for simple Darwinian principles- survival of the fittest and adaptation. If they want to stop evolution in its tracks, good for them. Just don't present this in the preview as something fans of the cat species will enjoy, because they won't. Fans of mice and small birds may cheer aloud, though.