The story goes, mice instinctively fear cats; it is not a learned behavior, because if it were, the first run-in of an uneducated mouse versus a cat would be fatal.
The fear is probably triggered to some scent the cat emits. However, cats need to eat, so one would expect that a cat which emits less of that scent would catch more mice, so be evolutionarily advantageously selected -- less likely to starve to death before creating offspring. What's going on?
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When cats wash themselves they spread oils that help to keep them waterproof, as well as covering themselves with stuff from their own saliva. I suspect they smell of compounds that are of enough survival value not to be worth doing without.
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