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How bad was your cat this week?


Fragile Bird

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While I was gardening this week I watched my brother and SiL's cats attempt to kill various creatures around the backyard. Fortunately they were unsuccessful, this week anyway. At one point one of them chased a squirrel around the garden until the poor thing found shelter behind the air conditioner in a space too small for the cat to follow, where it proceeded to quiver for half an hour after I locked up the cat. I had to leave the backyard before it ventured to escape. While I realize many people consider squirrels to be simply rats with tails, I remember how my SiL got angry at my cairn terrier for chasing down a squirrel years ago. When she first got the cats, they were going to be indoor cats only, then, it was cruel not to let them outside, and after that, well, catching and killing things is perfectly natural. I told her to have the decency to at least lock the bird bath up in the garage.



It reminded me of a story I read at least a decade ago, about how researchers in Great Britain, trying to figure out how many creatures cats kill in a year, asked cat owners to bag up every remnant of dead thing the cat dragged in and send the remnants to them. As I recall, the estimate was more than a million songbirds were killed by cats each year.



So, what has your cat, or other pet, killed?



Only out of scientific curiousity, of course.







When I was a child we had a lovely grey cat that adored my mother so much she assiduously hunted down things to lay beneath my parents' bed, mice and birds usually. Our crazy next door neighbour (we'd probably say he had PTSD from fighting in WW II today) hated the cat and poisoned it. But crazy neighbours is another thread...


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My cats are indoors, so the only things they have killed this week are the infernal red dot, which mysteriously resurrected, a feather flip and a package of dental floss. They were very naughty though. The cat that had a hair ball on our desk come to mind.

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I have indoor cats but we take them outside everyday for supervised time in our enclosed backyard. One of my cats is also leash-trained and goes on nightly walks around the neighborhood. During these times there are many butterflies and moths and cicadas killed, but so far no birds. My one cat that used to live on a farm did catch a mouse and bring it into the house, alive, where I think it eventually escaped a few days later.

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Last week my cat killed not one but two mice in the basement. My basement has a dirt floor and is like something out of a horror movie. All sorts of icky things live down there. I gave kitty extra treats for the kills, because as creepy as it is, I'd rather not have mice in my basement.

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Charlie Ratslayer killed his first rat when he hadn't been fully weened. The creature was actually larger than him. As an indoor cat now, he subsides on only the murder of insect life on rare occasions. I have the best cat in the world. If you do not believe me, you can come over and ask him. He certainly thinks he is the highest life form on the planet.


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Our younger cat has a habit of bringing in live mice, which I then have to catch in order to take them back outside. Actually killing things is a lot less common (at least directly - I'm not optimistic about the life expectancy of the ones I "rescue").


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Our cats are indoors as well, so they don't get the chance to kill many living things, just the couch and the carpeting. Muppet will catch the occasional bug from the balcony and torment it for ever until it dies, especially the big grasshoppers that somehow make it up this high.



Funny this thread is here, I opened it up to complain about one of my cats waking me up an hour ago by puking up a nice hairball on the clothes I had set aside for work.





Eh, as long as they don't have sex with vegetable plushies I think you'll be OK.




:lol:


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Our cat is rubbish and can't even kill flies or tiny insects (I have seen him try). In fact he's so rubbish that he thinks the best way to avoid a dog is to pretend to be a statue. We also try to take him outside but the outside terrifies him and he prefers to be indoors, or possibly the balcony where he occasionally gets locked out (and subsequently found huddled under the table in an extremely unhappy mood).







Eh, as long as they don't have sex with vegetable plushies I think you'll be OK.








There's just no way to see broccoli the same way after that thread.


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I don't think it is bad of a cat to kill other animals. That is just a cat being a cat, "nature red in tooth and claw". Though admittedly I'm biased since I'm sure I have hopefully one un-pregnant rat running across my loft space I'd be glad of a sharp toothed cat, quick limbed, a sure hunter, to put up there rather than having to put down poison.



My sister has a cat who is a traditional scaredy cat - he's a sad sight. But as a child we had a cat that we'd bought from a farm, a beast of uncertain ancestry who'd only drink milk once it had turned sour and congealed into a solid mass and who had a curious taste for curry. His fur had an odd green tinge to it and he had a firm grasp of the principles of asymmetric warfare - for example only attacking my father when he was sitting down on the toilet or was walking down the stairs.



To give the birds a fair chance we put a bell round his neck - but he learnt to carry it in his mouth to deaden the sound. He once brought down a rabbit, dragged it back to our house, but couldn't quite manage to jump up and over the five foot garden wall with his prize in his mouth. He was particularly fond of chasing off small children who came too close to our property. For a snack he'd crunch on the spiders he found round the house. But all in all he was a pretty decent cat.


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Our younger cat has a habit of bringing in live mice, which I then have to catch in order to take them back outside.

Heh, I like sleeping with my window open and my cat uses that to come in and out during the night. Normally that's fine but occasionally he likes to catch a small animal, presumably on the ground, jump up onto the fence, jump from the fence onto the roof outside my window and come into my room all with the mouse alive in his mouth. He then releases the mouse in my bedroom chases it around for about a minute and then gets bored and gives up. Leaving me to catch a bloody mouse at about three in the morning.

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Nothing. Squeak is too stupid and thinks the birds should fly into his mouth. Tinker is too mad and never leaves the house and Puggle is too fat and isn't fast enough to catch anything anyway.



N



ps we once rescued a mouse from Puggle and let it out in the front garden - Puggle was pissed off with us for two days.


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