Tomcats, even the aggressive kind, sometimes lose the fight. Here is what happened to my first Tom, the light yellow cat, unaltered. He was a fighter who came home after two weeks awol with battle scars, marching triumphantly up the drive "mrowing" in cadence with his steps. Remember, this Tom was my first pet, so I was between 6 and 10 years old. We had left the house on a summer evening while it was still sunny. There were crawdad holes in the yard, the inch and a half in diameter hole with the muddy diggings piled up on the ground.
When we arrived home, our neighbor came over with the news. He had rescued Tom after hearing him set up a mighty howling. He followed the noise and there was Tom with the crawdad from the hole clamped to Tom's upper lip. Tom was known to paw down into things he couldn't see, and, perhaps, he had brought up the crustacean who fought back and pinched Tom as he tried to bite his catch.
Tom never again caught a crawdad. If you eat them, you may call them crayfish. If in a muddy hole in the ground, they are just crawdads. Cats are smart. They learn more than it is acknowledged by those who don't understand them.
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