There’s no telling what’s going to make a video go viral, and lately, it’s been cats freaking out. If you haven’t seen one of the many viral videos of cat owners scaring their cats with cucumbers, here you go:
Note: also watch if you want to see a cat fly.
By simply placing a cucumber behind an unexpecting cat, these owners are making their pets (literally) flip out. But why? Yes, I’m sure we’d all be a little frightened if a random cucumber was seemingly stalking us, but cats seem to have a more exaggerated reaction the this peculiarly shaped vegetable.
Jill Goldman, a certified animal behaviorist, told National Geographic that it is possible that the cat thinks the cucumber is a snake. I think we can all agree that if we turned around and saw a snake we might have a similar reaction. The cat is probably not used to seeing this shape just lying on the floor and there was no sound either, causing the cat to think that the vegetable is a predator.
But this might not be entirely true. According to Animal behaviour specialist Dr Roger Mugford, cats would be scared of just about anything you put behind them without them noticing. “I suspect that there would be the same reaction to a model spider, a plastic fish or a human face mask,” says Mumford. He suggests that it might just be fear of the unknown, and a surprise pineapple could be just as scary as a cucumber.
Don’t go testing out different fruits on your pet cat because you’ll scare the poor guy and might cause him to injure himself. But I guess you should be careful about surprise fruit sneaking up on your cat if you don’t want to spook him.