In this thread we were asked if we SPOKE- asks if your cats have ever caught a bird.
I heard Robert Sullivan on NPR promoting his book about rats and he says that you should never let your cat alone with a rat, the cat will lose everytime. (Or something to the effect.)
I grew up in farm country and I would swear that the local cats were constantly bringing in rats, but maybe I am misremembering.
Has your cats ever caught a rat?
Oh, yeah. Shortly after my hubby and I got married, his cat ran into the house with a rat, still squirming but mortally wounded. We were chasing him around trying to convince him that we didn’t WANT his generous gift, and my cat started meowing really loud, like she was saying, “HEY! Where’d he get a rat? I want a rat! Where’s my rat?” We finally chased cat and rat out. He caught a couple more after that, and left parts of them on the doorstep (the best parts, no doubt!). We have, thank goodness, moved to a rat-free house. We have deer, but he hasn’t caught one of those. Yet.
Cats have to be trained to kill their prey. They will hunt instinctively but it takes the training of another cat to bring home the bacon.
Your question depends on the size of the cat and the rat. A NY wharf rat vs my smaller cat… no contest.
I would worry more about an opossum. Big claws, big teeth, mean little shiks.
Ever heard of a deer mouse?
My cat brought home a small bunny last week and ate its head.
I live about a block up from the beach, and not far from the dry dock, canneries, and fishing gear storage areas. We had a kitty, only about half grown, bring in a rat one night. She dropped it at my feet and looked up for the adulation she expected to receive for presenting me with this most magnificent gift. She seemed confused when I pulled my feet up on the seat of my chair and proceeded to holler at my daughter’s then boyfriend to come and get the nasty thing out of the house! (the skiffologist was out fishing, and so the bf filled in as man of the house) This was a BIG rat, she had already disposed of it’s head, and without including the tail the horrid thing was still bigger than the kitty was…nasty icky poo!!! Strong, brave kitty!
I currently have two cats which I adopted from the shelter which had been feral, (trailer park dumpster kitties) and they do stalk and kill on a daily basis, despite the premium food they are fed. I love birds, but after getting up every morning one summer to a drift of feathers covering the kitchen floor I took my birdfeeders down. I also have a gimpy kitty (spinal cord damage caused by a psychotic min pin) and she likes to watch the birds and other small critters, but I have never seen her attempt to hunt. She was taken from her litter at 5 weeks (way too young) and never seemed to realize that she’s a cat.
We had a minor mouse invasion this past winter, and the two shelter cats certainly did their part in solving that problem!
My cat caught ordinary mice in the past. But, one time a “spitsmuis” got in our kitchen. I couldn’t find the English word for spitsmuis; although they aren’t, taxinomically speaking, closely related to mice, they are mouse-like in appearance, only smaller and with a more pointy snout. True mice are vegetarians and sort of little wusses; spitsmice OTOH hunt and eat insects and they are damned fierce little creatures.
This spitsmouse came out from under the fridge and boldly walked up to the cat, squieking fiercely. The cat was the one who turned and ran.
A wikipedia search (in two languages, ouch!) gave me the following result:
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spidsmus
We also have shrews and voles, which are mouse-like and provide the cats no end of amusement when they rustle around in the leaf litter!
Apparently, some shrews are poisonous (!) so perhaps your kitty was wise to back away!
For a couple of years after we started raising sheep and, more importantly, storing the grain they eat, our three cats brought us ratty gifts on a regular basis. But the rats always seemed a little small…
Then I caught a glance of the mother nesting in a discarded burlap sack. I forbid the cats to mess with her, but I think they’d already decided to pick on rats their own size (the babies). Lately, I’d say for the last two winters, we’ve seen no sign of rats-- neither live in the barn nor eviscerated on the stoop-- so we think the parents either died or left for a farm with less vigilant cats.
Most bites from rodents are dangerous, including that of rats. I think I’ve read somewhere that you can also get blood-poisoning from a human bite.
My cats have grown up outside and some of them have obvious hunting instincts, others don’t. My experience is that female cats typically have a strong hunting instinct and it matters little if they grow up learning from other cats or not, at best they can learn to be more skilled from their parents. My female cat was taken from its mother in the 8th week, and grew up with only her brother of the same age. She kills her prey most of the time, whether she wants to eat it or not. I have one small cat who only plays with his prey, never kills it (ok he might eat a moth), but finally the (huge) son of my female cat is an incredible coward when it comes to humans, but he’s a pretty instinctive little animal in most other respects. But I don’t have any evidence that he ever killed anything yet.
The female cat has so far only caught young birds of a kind that is doing incredibly well in the Netherlands (I think they’re called blackbirds in English), and not that many - nearly always young that jumped out of the nest before they could fly, which is rarely a good idea. I sometimes find a mouse.
One weekend though when I had many guests, on Sunday I found a mouse, a rat and a mole in my garden. I’ve no idea what happened there, it’s almost as if the cats had been out hunting as a pack, but they might as well just have found victims of traps or poison or whatever. But it was really weird, they rarely bring something in.
Incidentally, a cats size is almost inversely correlated to its hunting prowess. Smaller cats are typically a lot faster and quicker to turn, and they are very capable of catching and killing prey of their own size or larger. Cats are some of the most efficient individual land predators around, and the feline family of predators is known for its hunting prowess. Yes, when growing up in the outside, they can kill a lot of birds. Some housecats become feral and live in the Dunes, in the Netherlands, and they sometimes have to be shot there because they are too efficient at killing all birds and rodents there (in areas without high trees or similar refuges most birds don’t stand a chance).
On the other hand, rodents can be a serious pest to humans (in many ways) and cats have been and still are some of the best natural defense against them.
Shrews are amazing little critters, but this one was still lucky. Cats can do amazing things like jump over their prey, use their tails to jump in mid air, and land a paw into the spines of their victims before they’ve thought about turning around or running. :eek:
Mr. Sullivan did say that cats would always lose against an adult rat. This may still be an exaggeration, but I believe most rats caught by cats are juveniles.
kaiwik, thanks. I really should figure this wikipedia-thing out. 
My cat has never caught a rat. Mice, moles, rabbits, squirrels, and birds, yes. Rats, no. Only 1 of my 3 cats will kill anything. Of cats we’ve ever owned, only a few have been hunters.
Yes, but only when she was a wee young thing.
These day’s Sam finds moths hardwork (she’s 16 now) but in her day she was quite the ratter.
I had an alley cat that I sometimes fed that would kill rats almost as big as he was. He would also leave them where I could find them easily.
My late cat, Clapton, was a fine ratter.
We lived in Florida, & the canals & undergrowth made rats a serious pest.
But Clapton killed em left & right.
I think I read somewhere too that cats prefer to kill rats up to 6 ounces, and leave the bigger ones alone, especially since their survival barely ever dependso n it. I also think the bite of a rat can be poisonous to cats. But I’m willing to bet that when the stakes are high enough, the rat will end up with bits missing and a broken neck 9 times out of 10, and it won’t matter too much how big that rat is.
Now, porcupines, they are tricky! My cats have no idea how to deal with them … 
I have a story to tell, but it’s really going to upset cat lovers. It traumatized me as a kid. You have been warned.
When I was a wee lad, we owned an outdoor cat. (Dad wouldn’t allow them indoors.) When we moved to a farm, we were worried that if we left the cat outside in a new and unfamiliar location, it would run off. (That had happened to us once before.) The property had a greenhouse, so my dad’s solution was to let the cat spend a few nights locked up in the greenhouse until it learned to love its new home. Big mistake. Little did we know the greenhouse had rats. Big ones.
The next morning, all that was left of that poor cat was its head. Now maybe that only happened because the rats had numbers, but it surprised us to learn that a cat couldn’t hold its own in that situation.
Female cats are much better hunters than males, I think. Cats are quite a bit like lions in that the females do all the work and the males lay around and look important.
Cats catch rats on farms all of the time. However a rat is not a pushover.
Remember that song about the boy named Sue ? Well my first cat had a similar need to prove himself. Cindefella (adapted from the original “Cinderella” once the mistake was noticed) or “Cinders” was huuuuuge. He regularly beat up the neighbours’ cats (both inside and outside of their houses) and in his seven years of plunder I can recall countless mice and shrews, birds from small songbirds up to a partridge (Dad was furious that it was half eaten before being presented to us!), moles (once seven moles in five days!), rabbits and, most ilmpressive, a weasel. I’m trying to think if I ever saw a rat carcass tho’. I remember him getting an abcess on his ear which the vet thought was from a rat bite but I’m not sure I ever saw a dead rat - the nearest farm was a good half a mile away though so mybe it was too far to carry anything so hefty.
Oh and one of Ponster 's family cats was a rat killer the other not - the rat killer was twive the size of the birder. (Incidentaly his cats have had blood drawn on the back of their heads by angry swallows attacking and pecking as a team.)
