CATS. 59 



give them the dead rabbit with the skin just partially turned back, 

 and they quickly learned to complete the skinning. Still later 

 she gave them the live rabbit, with which at first they played, but 

 in a very short time they learned to approach the rabbit from 

 behind and grip it by the neck, lying practically on top of it 

 and pinching the gullet until the rabbit was strangled. Cats, in 

 his opinion, become rabbit-killers only when they are thus taught 

 by their mothers, but once they acquire the habit they feed on little 

 else. 



Dieffeifbach, writing of the Piako district in Auckland Pro- 

 vince in 1839, says, " The cats, which, on becoming wild, have 

 assumed the streaky grey colour of the original animal while in a 

 state of nature, form a great obstacle to the propagation of any 

 new kinds of birds, and also tend to the destruction of many 

 indigenous species." This statement about the colour of wild cats 

 has been made much of. It is true to only a very limited extent, 

 and I have always felt that such statements coming from a 

 traveller who had only limited means of observing the facts, and 

 apparently founded his conclusions on a few isolated observations 

 of the settlers are not always safe to generalize from. In the 

 present instanpe they led Darwin (in " The Variation of Plants 

 and Animals under Domestication ") to quote him, and to use the 

 statement as a proof of the strong tendency to reversion shown by 

 tha cat when it escaped from domestication. At the time DieSen- 

 bach wrote settlement was quite in its infancy, and cats had not 

 long been introduced. It is probable, therefore, that his statement, 

 whether the result of his own or other people's observations, referred 

 to cats which were themselves progeny of grey animals. It cer- 

 tainly is the case that in Central Otago, where cats were freely 

 liberated to cope with the rabbit pest, animals of many and varied 

 colours are now found wild. Mr. Robert Scott, formerly M.P. for 

 Central Otago, who had exceptional opportunities for observing the 

 facts, has recently given me most interesting information regarding 

 this question. He says, "The wild cat was, no doubt, the descendant 

 of the shepherd's and miner's tame cat. The predominating colour 

 was grey-striped (or tiger-striped, as some people called them), 

 occasionally yellow, and rarely black or black-and-white. The 

 time I write of was the ' seventies ' say, from 1870 on to the 

 time when poisoning the rabbits with phosphorized grain came in. 



