Subject: Cats would make more sense.
Author:
Posted on: 2014-02-18 02:59:00 UTC
Domestic cats, I mean. Not pumas.
I'm a cat person and it's not exactly a nice thought to me, but cats are probably the perfect Twilightverse vampire prey.
-They can't drink donated blood and they can't eat humans without either killing or turning them.
-Carnivores are the best substitute, for some reason. I have no idea whether the author ever considered why (beyond the testosterone overload), but if you look back at "Dracula" and at Renfield's insanity, it makes sense. He's feeding flies to spiders and spiders to birds, and then he wants a cat. He's trying to collect life. So it would make sense to me that, for a vampire, the blood of a carnivore would have collected more life than any other animal's.
-Size doesn't matter. If it did, vampires would go for men over women (men have more blood) and adults over children (ditto). But they don't. Apparently, vampires can sustain themselves on very little blood, which makes sense if you consider, along with the above, that it's the *life* in the blood that matters, not the blood itself. (Which is also why donated blood won't work; there's no metaphysical connection allowing the vampire to drain the life of another.)
So why cats? Well, cats are unique. Cats are obligate carnivores--that is, they eat meat and only meat. A dog will eat meat and bread and anything it can get. Same with a pig, or a 'possum, or a rat. They eat meat, but they also eat other stuff. So the life of a cat is one that has been sustained almost entirely on the lives of other animals. (We are assuming the cat is allowed to hunt rather than fed cat food, naturally.) Cats are deadly hunters who eat only meat; the best mousers can bring in ten mice a day just for fun. With the high metabolism of the warm-blooded, cats require comparatively more calories to live, meaning they have to eat more than a reptile or a fish would--making them a better choice than carnivorous fish or snakes.
Why cats rather than pumas? Because there are more cats out there, and because they breed faster. A cat becomes fertile at five months and can be expected to have an average of four kittens every four months thereafter during the warm kitten season. Cats are smaller and less territorial than mountain lions, meaning they can live in groups, need smaller territories, and can survive on fast-breeding mice and rats in an agricultural setting. A vampire which kept a barn full of cats could expect to have regular meals of high-quality blood from a sustainable population.
Why don't Twilightverse vampires eat cats? Because the author doesn't want them to do something so strange and horrifying as killing our loved house-pets and valued working animals. But wouldn't the story be better if they did?
If you're a vampire, you have to deal with the reality that you have to kill directly to survive--you can't just eat plants, and you can't eat meat that's neatly processed and packaged beforehand. You have to kill with your own two hands. Psychologically, you are very different from the typical human, especially the typical modern human. But if you are being sensible, and you want to survive without killing people (even if you are amoral, killing people is dangerous and unsustainable), you will have to go for eating small, fast-reproducing predators like domestic cats. Interacting with humans gets more awkward because your life is truly different from theirs. You are an alien, inhuman creature, a predator, a parasite--not just a sparkly pretty boy for a mary-sue to fall in love with.