I have the Greatest Cat in the Universe!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My cat is pushing past 15 years old. She is retired. Last night she was looking out the sliding glass door at her outdoor domain, when suddenly she began running back and forth, looking out the window with those dialated pupils and cocked ears that cats get when “Hunt/Kill” mode sets in. I opened the door, seeing a brief flash of some member of the family rodentia scurrying for its life. Although the mouse had a several second head start, within 10 seconds, the superiority of the genus Felis had been demonstrated, the mouse was dead, and dangling limply from her mouth.

She strode into the house triumphantly. I swear, I was less excited when Italy won the World Cup yesterday (and that was pretty excited). In all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never, NEVER, not even ONCE, seen her take down prey. I’m so proud of her! I was ecstatic, to say the least.

My SO had a significantly different reaction, expressing extreme disgust at the slaughter of the mouse and my resulting glee in particular. Some people just aren’t cat people.

It was like a scene out of Highlander. Suddenly, she looked and acted 10 years younger. She spent the next hour dutifully staring out the window for more prey as though she were a sentry expecting the enemy to come out of the forest any second.

Yes, she consumed her trophy, but only after I put her, mouse in mouth, back on the porch. Hey, I’m proud, but I just shampooed the carpet. This also did not go over well with the SO. After my cat finished, she left the head on the porch. I grabbed a broom and swept it off. When my SO asked what I was doing, I replied “You don’t want to know.”

2

My SO’s cat actually managed to catch and eat a moth over the weekend. Neither she nor my cat are any good at catching bugs, despite our best efforts to teach them. (Yes, us trying to teach them is as funny as it sounds.) So we were really excited about the moth killing.

A mouse is way beyond anything either of them could handle. Good for your cat!

3

I have three cats, Stache, Banshee and Jet Jaguar. But Jet Jaguar is the coolest cat in the Universe. Nyah nyah. :smiley:

Seriously though, glad to hear your cat has the stuff even at age 15. 'Stache is pushing 10 or 11, Banshee is 9 and Jet Jaguar is about 5. i hope they all have the HK ability when they hit 15…but they are house cats now. (I live on military posts, so I can’t let them roam free)

4

I hope, if I may, to interject a dog related story.

When I was a kid we had a Sheltie named (of course) Lassie.

Lassie played on a daily basis with the various squirrels that lived in the neighborhood. The squirrels would run back and forth along the top of the backyard fence, just out of reach, shaking their tails seductively and chittering with squirrel laughter. Lassie would charge up to the fence, tail wagging, tongue flapping in the wind, bark-bark-barking, and the squirrels would bound away only to return again a few moments later to play the game some more.

It was a mutually beneficial relationship. Lassie got to feel the thrill of the hunt, the squirrels got a good laugh and a little excitement to liven up their day. They both seemed relatively happy with the arrangement and life went on peacefully in our quiet little Greeley suburb.

Then one day, IT HAPPENED.

I remember it well. I was standing out front when suddenly a torrent of sound erupted in the backyard. It sounded for all the world as though someone’s car alarm was going off, but had a hysterical note to it that couldn’t be ignored.

I rushed around the side of the house, threw open the gate, and charged into the yard.

Coming out at high speed from behind the large pine tree in the NW corner of the yard was Lassie. There was a wild, terrified look in her eyes and an extremely irate squirrel writhing in her mouth. The Armistice had been broken, and no one was more surprise then Lassie.

You could tell her thoughts just by looking at her:

This is NOT possible!!
This is not the way the game works!!
I have no idea how this could possibly have happened!!
WhatdoIdo-whatdoIdo-whatdoIdo???

The squirrel is squirming in her grasp and squacking like the town early warning system

ROOOOOOO! ROOOOOO!!! ROOOOOOOO!!!

and Lassie is becoming more freaked out by the second. Having never thought she would ever actually succeed in catching a squirrel, she has no plan B to fall back on. She has made no preperations. There are no rules in the dog-squirrel game playbook defining this particular occurance.

She turned to with a look in her eyes that said: “FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, HELP ME!! THIS THING WON’T SHUT UP AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!!!”

Left with few options, I smacked her on the hindquarters and yelled “Lassie! Drop it!!”.

This seemed to bring her slightly to her senses. She dropped the squirrel and it skittered quickly up a tree, chattering up a storm of invectives that I feel lucky aren’t translatable to English. Lassie ran off in the other direction, her nerves totally shot.

After a time, the games returned again, but after ‘The Incident’ each of the parties was a little more wary of the other.

5

When I was younger, and living at home the house had a screened in porch.

Gringo, the very fat siamese was lounging on his fat side one day when a small bird managed to make it through the screen.

Like lightning, he went from lying on his side to a jump about 4 feet straight up, caught the bird in his mouth and ran inside the house where he killed it under my mom’s bed before we could catch him.

At the time Gringo was 14 and easily weighed 25 pounds.

Give kitty a nice treat from us, Gabe.

6

We had a cat that lived to be just short of 20 years old and right up until her kidneys failed she would bring us offerings of mice, small mammals like rabbits and squirrels, and birds to the back porch.

7

The cat at my parent’s house (though I still think of her as “my cat” I now have a cat with my husband too!) is 13 and still an avid hunter…during the summer. Once the snows begin to stay, she sleeps all day in front of the fire place, regardless of whether or not a fire is set. Come the spring thaws, and she’s out there every night, and more often than not, comes home with a treat for her family! She still disappears for 2-3 days at a time a few times a summer and lives off of her mad hunting skillz. She’s brought back mice and moles, rabbits, birds (even a crow once!) frogs, snakes, and a giant dragonfly. If it moves, she catches it! My parents old cat, who disappeared this past year, was a decent huntress too, except that she had the bad habit of bringing her prey back alive, and dropping them under the dining room table, where they’d then attempt to scamper off. Usually, we’d go wake up the good huntress, plop her down wherever the mouse or other prey is, and wait for her to notice it. A few seconds later, it was dead.

The cat I have now is an indoor cat, and the only thing I’ve ever seen her catch is a ladybug. She soon learned to regret that, as ladybugs are very good at tasting BAD as a defence mechanism.

Completely off topic, but there is the craziest thunderstorm happening right now - It’s raining so hard and it’s so hazy that we can’t see very far across the street, and the cat is FREAKED OUT and hiding under the bed. We have to turn on the lights, it’s that dark! I love thunderstorms!

8

In college, our cat brought us a bird in its mouth and dropped it on the floor of our living room. Only problem was that the bird was only injured at this point. If flopped around, ran all over the house for hours before we could get it.

9

When I lived with my mom, we had two cats, my 30 pound inside wuss of a cat Fonzie and the outdoor hunter tom TJ.

One day the Fonzie was taking a brave tour of the front porch, when TJ launched himself and a freshly slaughtered chipmunk.

I don’t know if TJ was sharing or bragging but Fonzie looked from him to the chipmunk with utter disgust and slapped the holy hell out of TJ, tore into the house and stayed under the bed for long time.

After that he was vary of the porch and of TJ

10

My 10-year old cat is a champion mouser. When we lived in Manhattan, in a ground floor apartment, the world was his oyster. Mice at least once a month! He played with them for as long as they could manage to stay alive. Now he gets a few here and there. We’ve just plugged another hole in the foundation which hopefully will cut the mouse population completely. Jack will be very disappointed, although I will be happy to no longer find blood smears in the downstairs bathroom.

Squirt’s 20, mostly blind, deaf, and toothless. She’s the world’s greatest cat, but she no longer has what it takes to chase anything. But, as a near-deaf Siamese who can’t hear herself, she is probably the loudest cat in the world. So she has that to be proud of.

11

For old cats, catching a mouse is like the fountain of youth. It totally revives them for a while.

12

Our indoor cat, Neko, loves to play fetch. He also loves to stalk bugs in the house. I’d love to let him outside and watch him stalk lizards and bugs outside, but it’s just not practical where we live.

One of my other cats lives at my parent’s house. She is as close to completely feral as a cat can be without actually being wild. She’s amazing to watch in action, and has brought home many a mouse, bird, and lizard (much to my mother’s dismay). She’s the laziest thing laying around the house, but when you see her out on the prowl she’s like a minature cougar, all lithe and muscular.

13

Our cat Beamish was an A-number-1 huntress. She loved to kill little woodland creatures and then leave presents on our front stoop as her way of saying “Wake up!” She operated with surgical precision to a degree which frightened me. Bad enough to find countless vole heads on the Welcome mat, their little mugs frozen in the horror that must have been their finals moments, but Beamie would also excise the sweetmeats: little mounds of entrails, expertly cut from the corpse. I always felt like I should call forensics.

14

A friend of mine had an indoor-outdoor cat named Sardus who weighed, maybe, 6 pounds dripping wet. She looked bigger than that, but it was all fluff.

She regularly brought home rabbits bigger than she was. I have heard my friend say that they were really worried that, some day, they’d find a dead deer on the doorstep. (No, they never did. At least, not that I ever heard about.)

15

:eek: :eek:
:wink:

16

I can top it.

A friend of mine’s family had a cat that lived to be 23 years old. By the end, she was toothless and arthritic. However, the year before she died, she caught a mouse. Having no teeth, she couldn’t do much damage to it the usual way, so she dropped it onto the driveway, intending to have a go at it with claws. My friend was watching this happen.

The mouse hit the ground, looked up at the cat with what appeared to my friend like abject fear, and then fell over and died.

The 22 year old arthritic toothless cat was that scary.

17

As a contrast, I offer my Sara. At the changing of the seasons, we sometimes get a mouse or two into the house from the woods that almost surround us. Sweet Sara will chase them. She almost never catches them. Once she cornered one, literally, in the corner of our front hallway. The critter was jumping up & down on its hind legs like a cartoon caricature of itself and Sweet Sara was patting it with her soft little paw. Yes, she has claws. No, she doesn’t know how to use them.

Back in the day, we had an orange stripy cat, Pumpkin, who was so stupid he made an exellent mouser. He would sit ALL DAY and ALL NIGHT wherever he had last seen a mouse. Staring into a corner of the basement, for example. Eventually if it came back he would go in for the kill. We figured he was not bored because he could not remember anything long enough to be bored.

18

I had a cat who was the runt and even as an adult she was tiny. Yeah, I don’t think she ever weighed more than five or six pounds. Also, she was declawed in front. Anyway, one day I look out into the backyard and there she was, taking down a pigeon as big as she was with nothing but her teeth and back claws. That was something to see, as the bird kept trying to fly away and she kept pinning it by practically wrapping her body around it.

19

Yep- I had a cat that by the age of 15 was a wreck- declawed when we got him, mostly toothless due to a car, lost an eye to a different car, had his back legs screwed up by yet a different car so that he dragged himself around like a seal in the end, and didn’t groom his long, lovely, fluffy, jet-black fur for three years until he grew cat-dreads. (He lived five years in that state.) But he’d still chase the neighbor’s much larger dog around, and leave rabbit heads on the foot of my parents’ bed.

Our current cat is 9, and overfed indoors but still reverts to his barn-cat youth- he’s easily fifteen pounds, but it’s fat packed onto his muscular frame. He’s always bringing home rabbit and squirrel kidneys and tails.