The mice or the kitties? widdershins’ post reminded me of this.
My SO (at the time) and I adopted a street kitty. We lived in a duplex (I still live here) that shares a courtyard with a large house subdivided into five apartments. A little community.
“Buster” had been a previous resident’s kitty and we fed him. And fixed him, and got him patched up after rough nights on the feline singles scene. He remained, though, a street kitty.
It developed that Buster began providing the other occupants of the complex with dead birds, mice, what have you. But not us.
While we weren’t exactly feeling deprived, we wondered about it and asked our veterinarian. She provided her interpretation.
We were good hunters who had enough to provide Buster with all the chow he needed. Nobody else fed him, so they were not such good hunters as to have excess. So, being both provided for as well as being the good hunter that he was, and being the good member of the community that he was, Buster was providing for those in need - which we were obviously not.
Sounded good. My SO bought it whole. I don’t know - that “good member of the community” bit doesn’t exactly jive with kitty gestalt, in my experience.
my cat is going through a post-partum killing spree. now that her kitties are weaned and starting to need real food, she’s dragged home all sorts of wildlife, and usually i don’t have a problem with it if it goes down in the basement with her, but today was another story.
first off, she woke up being a spaz. the first thing she did when we let her out of the basement was to climb the entire height of the screen door. (my mum’s allergic to cats, so our cat is allowed inside for a little while each day, then allowed outside, then put in the basement at night)
so she let me put her outside. five minutes later, i hear a tussle, and she scrambled up the other side of the screen door–with a wriggling chipmunk in her mouth!
then she jumped down, and tussled with it some more, and it stopped fighting back. she held it in her mouth, so i figured her kitties must be hungry. i opened the door to let her back in, and she drops the chipmunk and leaves it outside. she mewled for me to let her back out some more, and each time, i’m hoping “she’ll take it straight to the basement,” and instead she left it outside once she was done playing with it.
repeat that about four times, until finally she brought it in. i hurried up and opened the basement door, positive she’d take it down and eat it there. but no. she pauses in the middle of the kitchen floor and starts chomping away. bones crack, skin pops (the thing’s in rigor mortis) IN MY KITCHEN. while i’m trying to finish my breakfast. i’ve heard of people and animals having bonding experiences–but over brunch? ugh.
When I was growing up we had a cat that gave the most selective of offerings. She was always droping stomachs in the middle of the living room floor. Just the stomach, nothing else was worthy of presentation(actually my guess is she didn’t like stomachs and figured we were stupid enough to eat them, cause they always disapeared when she left them). Later she decided that she would eat with us. Whenever dinner started she would run out, catch something, and try to com eback in and sit under the table eating it. When we kicked her and her meal out, she out sit on the ledge outside the dining room window eating it.
We also had a dog, that was the fattest dog you will ever see. We put it diet dog food, but it just kept getting fatter and fatter until it died. When it died the vet said it had worms, and couldn’t believe that a dog with worms could eat enough to eat to death. The day after it died we found the answer. There were 4 birds and 2 gophers on the garage floor. The helpful cat was killing lots of things things every night, bringing them back to the dog, and the dog would eat them whole, so we never knew.
When we lived in New Mexico, hummingbirds used to frequent our house every spring and summer. When our kitties were still babies, we ste up hummingbird feeders, they would just watch. But as they grew, soon we realized those hours of watchering, they were really stratigizing. Our feeders quickly became killing grounds, and most wound up on our doorstep. We discountinued the feeders.
Just to be thanked with moles, mice, chipmonks, other birds. Killer instinct.
A friend of mine has a cat who stalks and “kills” plastic bags. They have to keep all empty plastic bags put up and out of sight. Bringing home groceries is always entertaining in that house.
She will stalk ordinary indoor plastic bags but her prey of choice is the elusive and rare outdoor plastic bag. She will stalk a plastic bag blowing across the yard very carefully, pounce and kill it, and bring her kill back to her owner, dropping it proudly at her feet.
And if you have the audacity to laugh at her she becomes horribly offended and stalks off, tail twitching, to hide under the bed until she’s decided to forgive you.
You think you folks have effective hunters… One of the cats who cohabits with my Mom (her name’s Origami, but we all call her Baby) is so good, she can hunt, and kill, invisible prey. Everything will seem normal in the living room, when all of a sudden, Baby goes into a hunting crouch and starts scanning the room. She’s clearly following some moving object. All of a sudden, the POUNCE, and she’s holding her paws in front of her and working her jaws. It’s a good thing she’s on the job, or the place would have filled to the brim with invisible mice and birds by now.
The other three cats at Mom’s house will kill sparrows and the like, but they’ll usually just quietly finish them out in the backyard. When they do bring us an offering, it’s usually still live and whole (you want to keep the meat fresh, after all), and Mom just gets them to drop it and chases the bird back out of the house.
She’s defending you against the invisible poison monkeys. I don’t know WHAT people who don’t have cats do about the poison monkey scourge - I wouldn’t want to be them, though.
My dad was camping many years ago, he was sitting at the campfire at night and a wild cat tentativly approached but would not come closer then the edge of the campfire light. It looked hungry and it could sure smell the food. My dad threw it half a hotdog which it quickly picked up and ran off into the dark with. About an hour later it approached again, again not coming closer then the edge of the light. This time it had something in its mouth. It got to the edge of the light and dropped it and ran off into the darkness again. My dad went to see what it dropped for him and it was half of a baby squirrel. …thats almost heart-warming isnt it?
My old cat would sit atop a speaker in the livingroom and watch a fly for close to a half hour never taking its eyes off. Suddenly he would jump down, run accross the floor, LEAP into the air and catch the fly in his front paws and collapse into a heap on the floor as he no longer had use of his front paws, then quickly eat the fly.
One summer my cat developed a fondness for neatly dismembering one or two rodents per day, and leaving their innards in alarmingly tidy little piles on our front porch. She disposed of the skins, bones, and loose flesh, leaving everything else for us to enjoy. Every morning I’d open the door, and there’d be intestines, assorted unidentifiable organs, and sometimes other chewed-up bits, all thoughtfully separated. Once my dad stepped bare-foot in rabbit entrails and we kept the cat inside for the remainder of the summer.
My mom had a murderous cat named Honey. I found this perfect little round ball on the bach porch one day. I got up closer to it and bent down really close before seeing that it was actually a little birdie head. Only the head, I don’t even think the beak was still there. Then one time I heard her crunching on something out in the backyard. She sat it down for a second and I saw what was left of a rabbit’s head. The rabbit head was almost as big as the cat’s head! She also used to reenact the whole crime. She would show us how she stalked, then pounced. And then she would show us how she held it in her front paws and kicked it to death with her back paws. Sometimes the dead thing would seem to fight back and almost get away, but she would eventually recapture it and continue to kill it. I think that cat had some real issues.
My little cats aren’t really murderers per say… They have been guilty of man (or bird) slaughter. They knocked over the finch cage and one finch got out and apparently got lost. We found it about 2 weeks later in the closet, no signs of a struggle. They also have been suspected in several incidences involving dried up little froggies and a couple of shrivled lizard tails…
One of the funniest things was the day shortly afte we moved into our new house and Midnight gave a growl of triumph. A moment later she descended the stairs with a freshly-killed feather duster in her mouth.
Not long after that she repeated the performance. With a Natural Sponge.
(Just for the record, although she is technically an indoor cat, she has gotten out and caught a snake, a bird, a baby mouse, several frogs, and countless insects.)
Childhood memory I haven’t thought of in years: We were watching the ** Outer Limits ** about the Zantis, big ant-like creatures attacking earth. Our cat Tom, who was hiding under the couch, jumped out and grabbed my brother’s ankle. He leviated, with the cat still neatly attached.
