> "cat would proceed to take nibbles out of every single one of them in turn",
Interesting, although I suggest it much more likely that this cat also really is triggering some kind of "snake recognition circuit", it seems to be driven by some desire to make sure each cucumber is "dead". If it were only about liking cucumbers you would expect it to gobble down the nearest delicious thing it sees, which in my own observation of the felis catus, this is their default behavior when there is favored food and no danger present, they tend to act like greedy vultures, though it differs from cat to cat.
That's the problem: people are extrapolating species-wide behavior from a tiny sampling of an animal with high variability. Some feral sisters have set up shop on a family member's property and given birth to several litters so at this point I've got experience with two dozen cats over my lifetime. The natural variability in personality I've observed in three month old kittens raised in the same environment by two biological sisters (who themselves have vastly different personalities), is staggering. I have no freaking clue where people get most of their cat stereotypes.
> If it were only about liking cucumbers you would expect it to gobble down the nearest delicious thing it sees
Why? I can't imagine anyone in my family eating a cucumber after a cat has bitten it for sanitary reasons so I expect he quickly learned that the more cucumbers he nibbled on the more he got (these are home grown cucumbers, not the giant monstrosities in US supermarkets, so he'd want more than one).
Interesting, although I suggest it much more likely that this cat also really is triggering some kind of "snake recognition circuit", it seems to be driven by some desire to make sure each cucumber is "dead". If it were only about liking cucumbers you would expect it to gobble down the nearest delicious thing it sees, which in my own observation of the felis catus, this is their default behavior when there is favored food and no danger present, they tend to act like greedy vultures, though it differs from cat to cat.