The first two stories here are true stories about ONE cat, who lived to be nearly 20 years old. This cat was a spayed female, and a definite homebody. She liked going outside, but only if she KNEW she could get back in within seconds, and she never went farther than about 10 feet from the door. We usually supervised her, but didn’t use a leash or harness.
When we first got her, we lived in a student shack–a house that had been split up into ten or so apartments, and was rather run-down (but CHEAP!). One night, in the middle of the night, DH and I were sleeping when we awoke to the sound of the cat thundering across the bedroom floor. I woke up, and sat up just in time to see a mouse run up DH’s side of the bed, across both our pillows, and down under the nightstand on my side of the bed, with the cat in hot pursuit. I caught the cat, but the mouse was pretty much out of reach for all of us. Since I have no desire to have to undergo rabies treatment, we opted to shut the cat in the bathroom for the rest of the night, and let the mouse escape quietly into the recesses of the walls, rather than try to catch it ourselves. A couple of weeks later, though, we went somewhere overnight for a weekend, and left the cat alone in the apartment (with lots of food and water). When we got back, I walked into the bedroom and something crunched under my foot. Upon close inspection, I found a completely clean (bone only, no tissue at all) mouse skull–apparently the only part of the mouse that the cat hadn’t eaten. The cat was ENORMOUSLY proud of herself when I found it, too.
A few years later, we were in another apartment. This one was a second floor apartment, with a largish porch and sliding glass door and screen. We frequently put bird seed out on the porch, so the cat could sit at the door and drool at the birds and squirrels that came to eat it. The squirrels in particular drove her crazy, since they would come up to the door and look straight at her, knowing that she couldn’t do anything about it. One day, it just got too much for her, and she charged a squirrel that was sitting on the edge of the porch. For some reason, on that same day, we had both the door and the screen open. The cat FLEW across the porch after that squirrel. Of course, the squirrel made a clean getaway, but the cat ended up flying OFF the porch. She was completely unhurt, but very shaken, and she completely ignored squirrels for several weeks after that.
Our current two cats are much younger, but declawed, and we keep them indoors with rare supervised excursions in the fenced backyard. (One of the cats had apparently never been outdoors before she came to live with us, and was totally terrified of the prospect the first time we invited her to come outside with us.) However, they both consider themselves proud hunters, and are quite good at stalking twist-ties, laser lights, and each other. We do, however, get the rare mouse in the house because we live next to a large open field. One night, I had problems sleeping–general insomnia, aggravated by the sounds of at least one cat running around madly in the basement. I finally got out of bed just to find something else to do, and stepped on a dead mouse as I walked down the hallway to the family room. It was 3am, and I considered just leaving it there for DH to deal with in the morning, but ended up picking it up (with a piece of cardboard) and taking it out to the compost heap. We still don’t know which cat actually did the deed, but both of them have taken a much greater interest in the FED (Feline Entertainment Device) that hangs in a tree just outside the living room window. We put bird seed in the FED two or three times a week, and it attracts birds and squirrels that both of the cats drool over. Sometimes, a squirrel or a bird actually comes up to the windowsill where the cats are sitting, and they both go completely berzerk.
