This morning it was a baby bunny screeching and squealing its way off this mortal coil. Sometime after lunch it was a bird of some sort as evidenced by feathers all through the house.
But tonight was the coup de grace.
I’m sitting out on the porch enjoying a summer evening when he arrives with a large mouse. I told him to take it outside but he just flips me off and is licking it or something. This is apparently not gross enough so he decides he needs to eat it head first which entails crushing its skull into bite size portions.
Crunch, Crunch, Crunch
I leap up from the chair flailing about and yelling, so he laughs and runs under this cart thing that has a shelf about 6” off the floor.
Crunch, Crunch, Crunch
Now I have to pull the cart thing away from the wall and of course it has 20 delicate things on it so it doesn’t move far and it doesn’t move fast. But the cat and I have been to this movie before, he just moves along and stays under the cart.
Crunch, Crunch, Crunch
Ready to puke I start swatting at the cat under the cart ironically yelling “You Rat Bastard” at the top of my lungs. I come away with blood and other matter on my hands. The cursing is the only thing stopping me from hurling all over the porch. I can hear the neighbors laughing. They live about 300 yards away.
Crunch, Crunch, Crunch
I’m able to locate a broom and convince this monster that ‘The Cat Beatings Are About To Begin’ and he runs out the door. All I have to do now is reach around in the dark under this shelf and find the headless corpse and dispose of it. I try to fool myself by using a paper towel but this is just nastiness. If I just throw it in the back yard he’ll find it and bring it right back. I don’t want it rotting in my trash for a week, so I have to take it down across the road and throw it into the woods.
So, just to clarify, you have one of nature’s most perfectly adapted killing machines. This naturally perfected killer, this semi-domesticated carnivore lives in your home, and you allow it to go outside so that it may hunt. You are then upset when it comes back with a kill. Is that right?
Are you honestly angry, or was this more of a MPSIMS/joke pitting?
[ol]
[li]You live near the woods, presumably filled with small animals,[/li][li]you have a cat, which is a carnivorous predator by nature, whom you let outside, and[/li][li]this cat goes into said woods, hunts small animals, drags them home and eats them?[/li][/ol]
Y’see, I’m thinking that 1 and 2 are pretty much inevitably going to lead to 3.
I used to live in a house where the landlady had three cats who went outside at will, in a heavily wooded area. Once we found a dead fish in the upstairs bathroom, which I thought was a pretty impressive catch. The most amusing incident in hindsight, however, was the live baby bunny. That’s right, live and pretty much unharmed: the cat had caught it and carried it into the house, up the stairs, and into the bathtub, where it proceeded to watch as the poor baby bunny ran back and forth trying desperately to scale sheer porcelain walls powered by nothing but tiny bunny legs and pure terror. That cute fluffy snuggy-wuzzums (the cat, not the bunny) was one bottle of lotion away from becoming the feline version of Buffalo Bill.
Long story short: your cat, by nature of being a cat, is a carnivorous predator. Probaby the only reason he hasn’t tried to eat you is because you’re useful to him and much bigger. Don’t get me wrong, I love cats, but you have to remember that they’re not dogs. Cats are just barely domesticated, as you’ve discovered.
Yup, it’s pretty much doing what it was born to do- kill things. Maybe you’d do better with an indoor cat, but that doesn’t really stop it completely. Last night my cat trapped a HUGE nasty palmetto bug in between my bed and my nightstand. Guess who had to move the bed and nightstand to get it and kill it? That would be me. Farking cat- if you’re going to corner something, at least kill it so I don’t have to!
The cat is following its ethical imperative to improve the gene pools of bunnies, birds, and other cute feathery or furry things.
Wrong.
If you’re lucky, the cat brings them to the neighbors; I don’t know why, but sometimes (thank the gods), they do.
Wrong again; the cat has tried, unsuccessfully, to kills its keeper. All cats do.
(You all think cats are vicious, try gardening. Watch what plants do to carve out a bit of territory. Nature red in tooth and claw has nothing on nature green in rhizome and thorn.)
Yeah and we essentially torture and kill cows and chickens before we eat them. Don’t you think there’s a lot of terror to the livestock before they get slaughtered?
The problem isn’t the carnivorous predator. The problem isn’t that my backyard is ‘the killing fields’.
The problem is the show.
He needs to do his thing out there in the yard. Way out there in the yard.
He has the run of the house and there isn’t much I can do about it. After our little scene I went around and closed all the doors so he couldn’t get in and 5 minutes later as I was posting, there he was at my feet. How the hell he got in I don’t know. That’s a battle I lost years ago.
Perfectly adapted killing machine doesn’t begin to describe it. This goes on day after day. Dead animals everywhere. At least once a week I wake up in the morning with something dead in the bed. Bunnies, squirrels, mice, moles, birds and one thing we never did identify. Live bunnies? Common. I throw them over the back fence and wish them Godspeed. Things left in unused parts of the house til the stench wafts up the stairs? Been there, done that.
I’m down with the food chain thing but the line is drawn at ignoring me and crunching up skulls on the back porch.
My others don’t do this.
Two things about this cat.
There is a mouse that shares his food dish in the kitchen and has for some time. He does nothing about it and I think there’s some kind of arrangement I should be worried about.
And the predator has been the prey. He’s the one that was snatched by the hawk (in same said backyard) and had to get 160 stitches in his ass.
Our goddamned cat does the same thing. Rats, rabbits, quail, doves, the little fucker gets all of them. Pisses me off when he doesn’t kill them and just leaves them wounded. I’ll finish them off if I have to, because they are just going to suffer before they eventually die. I’ll do it, but fuck if I wake up in the morning wanting to kill a baby bunny.
But we have coyotes around here too. One morning our cat will be gone, and I won’t spend much time looking for him.
“He’s so vicious! You know how cats will bring home a little dead present? Like a little dead bunny, or a little dead bird? We’re afraid one of these days he’s going to bring home, like, a little dead five-year-old.”
When the weather gets nice, my mom lets the family cat roam the drainage field behind our house. Our kitty will dispatch entire nests of field voles, whereupon she will line their battered carcasses on the deck stairs so our CHF-riddled spaniel will munch several of them down with what few teeth he has left.
My parents praise her for her lethal efficiency with honey smoked turkey breast and the occasional spoonful of tapioca.
I praise her for her lethal efficiency, this creature who is so petite that she is overweight at 10lbs but made her first kill while tethered to the house on a 15 foot leash.
As far as I can see, my cats have no hunting instinct. 4 of them, and they do zip for mice, moles etc. One of them will occassionally be interested in a passing moth.
Does yours ever wake you up in the middle of the night, crying because her “toy” is broken and won’t run when she bats it around anymore?
Even at three in the morning I register that particular tone in her voice, and know to watch for something small and dead when I walk to the bathroom in the morning.
Really? Do elaborate, this sounds interesting. I’m pretty sure one of mine has tried I wake up with scratches sometimes, is that the sort of thing you mean? (I’m a fairly new cat servant, I’ve only had mine for a little over 3 years for the oldest and about a year and a half for cat #2).