How effective is the fresh-kill pile? by Tyrantstorm

Tyrantstorm wonders if the fresh-kill pile is actually useful or not in clan life.

How effective is the fresh kill pile?
WARNING: MATH ALERT
Hello blogclanners and today I’m going to be talking about a subject that has been bugging me for a while: Is the fresh-kill pile sufficient to feed so many cats? I’ve found some strange things on this topic, so buckle in. It’s going to be a wild ride.

So first we would need to know how many cats there are. In ThunderClan, there are probably about 30 cats, so let’s start from there. There are maybe 2 hunting patrols a day, with about 5 cats per patrol, some apprentices here or there. They each catch 1-3 pieces of prey. At best, that’s 30 pieces of fresh kill a day, at worst, 10. Now, a normal mouse weighs about 1 ounce. A cat, at its healthiest, will eat about 8 mice, or 8 ounces of meat. Now obviously, they aren’t catching 240 mice a day. So what are they eating?

Let’s look at squirrels. According to a study (yes I did do research) a common squirrel has about 147 calories (and no I’m not going to ask how they got those numbers.) According to another research, cats need about 25-34 calories per pound. Our tabby thunderclanners will probably weigh about 8-12 pounds. That’s 200-408 calories per day. Not all cats are tabbies, but for the sake of me racking my braincells, assume they are. Obviously, a squirrel or two could feed a cat. Let’s say two squirrels per cat. With thirty cats, that would be 60 squirrels per day. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely these thunderclanners are going to have 60 squirrels per day. Hunting patrols would have to catch 6 squirrels per cat. Even 3 squirrels per cat would be a bit much. They aren’t going to be catching 60 squirrels a day either, so let’s look at someone else.

I’m going to use the house sparrow, because I don’t want to write 50 paragraphs on birds. Now obviously, birds can fly, so cats will use up some extra calories. I’m not calculating this, but if anyone wants to expand, this is a great way to do so. Anyway, a typical house sparrow weighs about 30g. 100g of sparrow gives you 132 calories, so we need to get 30% of 132. The math gives us 39.6 calories per 30g of sparrow. Remember that the cats need 200-408 calories per day, or about 7 sparrows per cat. That’s 210 sparrows a day. The early bird gets the worm, but this one is going extinct. Sparrows won’t give us our fix either.

If we were in RiverClan, this problem wouldn’t exist because of fish. They get enough fish per day to last them a long time. ShadowClan pretty much will eat anything that scurries past them, so they should be fine. Unfortunately for WindClan, they hunt rabbits. Rabbits are fast and they spend a lot of calories chasing after them. They usually will get 3-4 rabbits per hunting patrol. SkyClan is the same as ThunderClan, except they might get a little more squirrels and sparrows. The Tribe of Rushing Water is doing great with their humongous birds. BloodClan is eating chicken off the side of the road, so they’re infected with a lot of pathogens. They’ll die off soon.

Now obviously, this isn’t going to have an impact on Warriors, since we’ve survived so long like this and changing things now would be arbitrary. I don’t know what kind of messed-up biology these cats are, but they are very energy-efficient, so much so that they can create energy out of nothing. I remember one scene where Graystripe was complaining of a bellyache from eating one too many birds. That might not have been such a bad idea…

If Warriors followed basic cat biology, the solutions would be to either hunt for yourself, become a kittypet, or die off. So stop wasting calories over StarClan and imposters, and start eating. We have a long ways to go.