interspecies dating could more appropriately be called "interspecies encounters." But wouldn't you have been less likely to click on that link than this one?  You filthy-minded Internet freak.

This page chronicles, with illustrations, the occasional and frequently-testy interactions between household pets of different species, during the first half year that I lived in Malaya's condo.

I brought with me from San Diego two adult rats, and one adult ball python, and Malaya already possessed a large black male kitty, AKA Dusty. After a few months we added to the mix by introducing a gray tabby kitten, AKA Jinx.  You can see photos of the snakes, rats, and cats on other pages in this section.  This page is made up entirely of photos of the various species interacting.

The way that my snakes and rats interact is pretty simple; frozen rats are thawed out and the snake eats them.  And that's pretty much that.  Neither of them are ever exposed to live versions of the other, and in fact the live rats have never been exposed to a frozen snake, so I suppose the entire interchange is pretty one-sided.

Since my big snake was given away before I left San Diego, and both of the adult rats are far too large for the small snake to consume, even if they were dead and thawed, there's unlikely to be any future interaction either.

However the cats find the snakes and rats to be objects of great interest and trepidation.

Here are some blogs where most of these photos were posted, along with more in depth discussion.

• September 22, 2003: Jinx arrives!
• October 11, 2003: Jinx encounters rodents for the first time.
• October 14, 2003: Jinx and Dusty encounter a snake and freak out.

Jinx does not know what to make of the rats.  They're damn near as big as she is, for one thing, and while her pouncing instincts come in a little bit if the rats are behind a sofa cushion and all she can see is their feet, mostly she just watches them scurry and backs up if they get too close to her feet.

Jinx in her usual "they're oh-so interesting and yet I fear to touch them" position.

In this shot I put the scratching post on the footrest, and put the rats on top of it. Jinx was fascinated and posed nicely in the background.  But posing is all she did, even as the rats climbed down the scratching post and leaped over to the couch to scurry behind the cushions.

Boy, it's a good thing that photos of cats looking at oblivious rats never gets old, isn't it?  

Yep, good thing.  Or you might be bored by now.

Here's two more shots of this, if you just can't get enough.

• Jinx with two rats.
• Jinx with the same two rats, several seconds later.
• Jinx with the white rat.

Jinx does like to sniff at them, a little, and the rats like to sniff at her.  Jinx just isn't quite sure of her place in the prey/predator arc. And given that Janky is damn near as large as her, and higher up than she is, her confusion is understandable.

Dusty reacts much the same way, though he'll occasionally venture to bat at the rats, but only if he can see just part of them.  A tail vanishing beneath a cushion or a head poking out of an opening will put him into a batting fever, but he's never shown anything approaching the desire to attack or play with or kill the rats.  He's murder on small kitty toys with fluffy tails though, so perhaps his instincts would kick in more forcefully if the objective were smaller?

While the cats regard the rats with interest and some nervousness, they regarded the ball python with panic.  Jinx wouldn't come within six feet of the snake, even though it laid motionless, draped over her scratching post, for the better part of an hour.  She watched, but only from a distance.

Dusty was more adventuresome and got close enough to sniff several times, but he never even considered pawing at the snake.

For its part, the snake was entirely oblivious and indifferent to the cats, and since the day was pretty cool the snake wasn't exactly moving around a lot.  The cats are far, far out of the size range that the snake would consider hunting, so basically they're something to be ignored or feared, and since snakes aren't too bright and have very poor distance vision, we're not entirely sure that the snake ever even saw the cats.

Malaya looked at this photo and bemoaned how absurdly "tubular" Dusty is.  Like a sausage with legs.

He does do a good job of looking alert from time to time, when he's got something interesting to study, but you can sort of tell that he's mostly just thinking about his next nap.

This is the best of the shots, due entirely to the angle and Dusty's glowing blue eyes.  You could probably convince some people that he's just about to leap and attack, and slay the fearsome serpent with his kill-a-man-mouth.

But only people who weren't there to see him slink backwards in nervous confusion just a few seconds later when the snake moved and started crawling towards the purple chair he was standing in.

More photos to come, at some point. As of early 2006 the cats had had 3 years to get used to the snake, an while Jinx usually follows me around when I'm carrying him to or from being washed off, there's nothing like the frantic interest of the old days.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.