My kitties are all well fed, but they will snag an unfortunate piece of rodentia any time they can. Think of it as a toy you can eat when you’re done playing. 
In college, when our cat was prego, I would step out onto the front porch on my way to class and there would usually be a dead birdy for me. One time, there was a chewed up rabbit on the step… We kept her inside after that.
I watched my cat teach her kittens how to hunt. She first did bring dead mice and voles, then almost dead ones, then injured ones, and finally mice and voles that were uninjured. I haven’t a clue how she managed to bring them, but that was my least favorite part. Imagine your previously good huntress suddenly switching to bringing healthy mice INTO the house and garage and letting them go.
One cat never learned how to eat the dead mice. He’s find the ones other had brought and chew on them for hours and hours and hours, never breaking the skin, like furry mouse flavored chewing gum. It’s definitely a learned behavior for some cats.
One of the neighbours had a mouse infestation this summer and my six year old Cam was catching them at the rate of one or two a day, she’d rarely caught anything but moths before. After a couple of weeks she accidentally discovered they were edible and began crunching them up with horrid enthusiasm. She moved on to the kill a lot quicker after that.
My cats bring dead things into the house, and leave them as little gifts for me. This practice seems to be quite common. There seem to be three possible reasons:
**1.**The anthropomorphic one - it is a token of the cat’s lurv for their owner.
**2.**It’s a kind of pack instinct and they bring us stuff instinctively to keep on our good side.
…and now after reading this thread…
3. Because they instinctively know we’re effing useless hunters, and therefore a mothering instinct kicks in, and we are given dead things to learn with.
Never really believed 1 despite what various old aunts tell me, I used to assume it was 2, but now maybe i’m thinking 3.
My cat was 13 when she caught her first mouse. The late start didn’t weaken her any.
She toyed with the first one she caught until my mom found her and made her give it up. After that, she would kill them right away so that she wouldn’t be deprived her kill.
IIRC, cats & dogs go through an established protocol: first they stalk their prey, then they go into a point. Hunting dogs have been trained by electric shock devices to remain in point and not proceed to pounce. It’s funny to watch younger cats transition from stalk to pounce, when they wiggle their butts like cartoon characters. The next step is the kill, which is ideally an efficient bite to the throat, but if your well-fed cat isn’t particulary hungry, the kill bite will be delayed and he’ll stall around in the attack stage, which looks to us like he’s torturing his prey.
We may think it’s strange for cats to kill out of instinct even when they aren’t hungry, and lament the cruelty that results. But then we, unlike cats, copulate even when we aren’t reproducing. Considering what a female cat endures during intercourse, she must think her human counterpart is crazy.
not all of us are PETA commandos. Aside from the mess, it was probably entertaining :eek:
Besides… are you suggesting that animals should be deprived of thier natural instincts and/or food sources?
My cat speaks Human. She can only say “Mama” but it’s remarkably effective on me. She also has several Feline words, since she’s Siamese. There’s Meow, of course, but there’s Prrrrtpt? and Reow and several more, some of which are DEFINITELY cusswords.
First, I was pretty shocked. It was quite a gruesome scene. I remember being in crisis/panic mode. I tried to think of what to do, and all my ideas came up short.
Second, I was afraid of being bitten by the bunny. I have gotten bitten while trying to rescue animals in pain before, and rabies shots wouldn’t have seemed worth it.
Third, you do not separate Tickle from her prey. There was a high likelihood that she would have gone after me with a vengeance. It was at the bottom of a long, narrow stairwell in a space that’s maybe 4 square feet. Had she turned on me, I would’ve gotten hurt. I’d been bitten by her before, and ended up with an infection. Not fun.
Fourth, that bunny was gonna die either way. It already had hunks missing when I happened on the scene. And I kept thinking that surely the cat would finish off the bunny pretty soon. Just didn’t happen like that.
Fifth, part of me felt like this was something that happens in the wild every day; it’s the natural order of things, like it or not. As others have said in this thread, it’s not an evil thing. Animals are amoral.
Did I feel really bad about the bunny’s pain and suffering? Definitely. If I had been able to think of a feasible way to catch the bunny, avoid Tickle’s wrath, and then put the bunny out of its misery humanely, all without much likelihood of getting bitten/ripped up, I would have done it.
In defense of my character, I have other, more docile cats. And when I catch them torturing mice in a prolonged fashion, I usually catch the poor things and give them a reprieve.
Geez, you’ve kind of made me feel like a scum-sucking lowlife. 
I know that when my kitties kill a mouse, they come find me, yowl at me until I agree to follow them, and then lead me to their trophy. They clearly crave praise from their mommy figure.
(bolding mine)
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To add yet another animal to the list, dolphins kill for pleasure, too. I think they’re great, but in fact they can be really vicious.
As I said, I didn’t mean any offense. jester21’s insinuations aside, I was just curious and didn’t even think about the possibility that you were shocked into immobility.
Believe me, if you knew her (she was the original Cool Cat), it becomes about 100 times better.
No problem. The feeling didn’t last long. 
I didn’t find it entertaining. It was like watching a trainwreck.
Joke. I was making a joke.
The walruses must be relaxing on their summer vacation to the south seas. 
Thanks, sorry bout that
Do they honestly kill for pleasure. What pleasure do they get out of it?