heh, you may not have this it is mine.
a long departed kitty I took care of would leave a mouse or the back half of a bunny in the middle of the back yard for me. the best/worst was opening the door to get him in one evening and he bounded up carrying a mouse and when he got in he meowed proudly dropping the mouse who was still alive and scurried off into the house. the cat looked so confused as to where his toy went. i spent the next 10 minutes catching the mouse and then letting it go outside.
Edit to add: He never bothered with birds, despite the blue jays pestering him something awful when he just wanted to go lie down by the peach tree after getting to the catnip.
She growls for reasons we cannot comprehend.
Clearly, the kitty is attempting to answer the “what’s that” question. She says “burrrrrrrrd”, as well as it can be pronounced with a mouth full of a bird.
“Quick, take a picture before I eat it!”
Our feline resident, Chowder, delights in placing every manner of small rodent/bird on our doorstep.
My backyard is a tiny graveyard, seeded with the murderous intent of this cat.
This cat, which, I might add, is quite a bit overweight, and spends a good 14+ hours a day sleeping.
I shudder to imagine the hunting prowess of a sleek, more mobile cat.
Won’t someone please think of the chipmunks?
One of my feline overlords has an impressively large vocabulary, including the words “Towwwll?” when she has been sitting out in the rain for a while and wants to be dried, and “Fowwwl?” when she would like a chicken-neck.
Cats have obliterated the populations of native songbirds in North America. They kill billions of animals every year. Why not put a bell on your pet’s collar or keep it inside so that it can’t kill birds?
I have found that if your cat is going to bring you “presents” if you actually take some time out to pet the cat, tell it its a nice kitty, and generally reward it for doing so. Then leave it alone with its grisly cargo, it’ll sort of clean up on its own. If you get my meaning. Makes clean up easier, and I generally had better behaved and healthier cats once I discovered this. Of course that’s sort of contingent on the sort of cat that brings it direct to you, or drops it in a designated place and mews for attention. Back when I had a cat that used to leave severed raccoon heads on the porch, then lie in wait in the bushes to maim children, that approach would have been a non-starter.
Our kitty runs around yowling at the top of her lungs whenever she catches something, as though to brag about it. How she manages with her mouth full, I’m not sure. She hangs out in the back yard during the day, but seems to enjoy watching the squirrels and birds rather than hunting them- her catches are mostly stray socks.
No not really…they are quoting a meta study that aggregates a whole bunch of studies and has questionable numbers.
See here, here and here. The last one EXTRAPOLATES (and from what I remember of my math classes extrapolation leads to really bad and basically unusable numbers) from one study across america to kill roughly 4 billion critters a year but only 500 million or so are birds so that mostly rodents that they kill which is a good thing.
Yes they kill birds, yes the kill a lot of birds, and are probably responsible for the extinction of some localized species, but you know what TALL BUILDINGS kill twice as many birds as the cats do yet nobody seems to have their panties twisted over that.
Not mine, she sucks at hunting. When she sees a squirrel coming, she jumps out and says “boo,” and then wonders where the squirrel went.
Oh all the other kitties I have had were/are lame at hunting, they are all like do you know where that thing has been? Hell no I ain’t putting my teeth into that and the cat food probably tastes better anyway.
I have read that when a cat brings a treat it is trying to teach its stupid human how to hunt. This is how it would behave with a kitten.
Except kittens learn.
The general impression of those extrapolation-based cat-death-toll horror stories is that the authors started out with a desired sufficiently-shocking number, and then hunted around for small studies or single-cat anecdotes which they could extrapolate to get there
Cats have obliterated the populations of native songbirds in North America. They kill billions of animals every year. Why not put a bell on your pet’s collar or keep it inside so that it can’t kill birds?
Righto. Or why not just kill outdoor cats so they don’t kill birds? I’m wondering what kind of poison would work best, and how to administer it it without killing other animals. Maybe a slingshot instead? Or a pellet gun?
Keep your fucking bird killers INDOORS.
I always think, when confronted with this “cats are evil” meme, “Yeah, and humans have been such excellent stewards of the planet that we have every right to judge these creatures that we basically trapped into this sorry existence anyway. and besides when people do away with cats the resulting rat population boom does far more damage to the local birds.” (I actually have that entire thought go though my head, but never say it out loud.) Point is, “Are you fucking kidding me?” (not you, the other guy.)
It all depends on if you want to get arrested, taken to court, or possibly beaten to death by your neighbors. But, hey, to each their own.
One of my parents cats brought home a giant rat once, minus a head.
Also brought home a bird that wasn’t quite dead once and let it go inside.
Also there was the time the neighbours came around asking about their escaped budgie, and we found suspicious yellow feathers in the back yard.
And bell collars didn’t work. She pulled them off.
Her sister was the complete opposite. Never caught anything. She’d bring home pebbles (to leave in your shoes) and the odd leaf.
Yeah, this is why my cats are indoors cats. I wasn’t so fussed when they were bringing home house sparrows and the occasional myna (both introduced and invasive species where I live), and the native birds are mostly large parrots and too intimidating for cats. (We also have some much more intimidating birds nearby.)
I felt much more strongly about them killing native reptiles though. We’re often visited by lizards and when the cats came back with juvenile blue-tongue lizards, that was enough for me. They’ve adjusted well to indoor life and don’t hanker for the great outdoors.
If I lived in a city with nothing but pigeons they’d be outside like a shot.
