I went away this weekend to visit my new baby nephew and the rest of my family (so we can see who came first here;)), and ElzaHub stayed home with the cats. I got home tonight, and he informed me that he’d found a dead mouse in the living room.
:smack:
We know the cats killed it because he apparently heard them ‘playing’ with something at 5 AM this morning. They weren’t fighting with each other, but they were playing VERY loudly.
The mouse? He found it dead like this:
:eek:
with his little paws up in the air like he was being held at gunpoint.
So we think that the poor little guy had a heart attack at being ‘played’ with by our two little monsters. Hey, at least they’re good mousers, even if they’re somewhat sick and twisted.
I’m just hoping any of his little buddies who might be hanging around will take that as a hint and stay the hell away.
That whole playing with it until it dies of fear or exhaustion thing is something that disturbs me about cats. When my dog kills a rat, she just jumps on it, bites it, shakes it, drops it and that’s that. I had a cat once who was a great mouser (very much appreciated because the house would have been overrun without him) but he tended just to play with them for hours and it was sick hearing them squeak. So we figured out how to play “Fire the Cat.” We’d hear the telltale scritching noises in the kitchen and one of us would grab the cat while the other would sneak around to the far door to the kitchen, flip the lights on and flush the little rodent toward the other, who would then fire the cat right at the mouse. Once the cat had the mouse in his mouth, we’d pick the cat up again and give the mouse a yank on the tail. The cat, thinking the mouse was getting away, would bite down hard, killing the mouse instantly. Then we’d toss the cat outside to do with the mouse what he would. Sure, the cat was a bit disappointed that the mouse was so un-fun, but it made us feel a lot better about the whole process.
I suspect Pratchett will be a formidable hunter once he gets the chance, he has all the instincts and he is FAST. Stiggs totally ignores rodents but will catch birds on the wing–he’s a specialist, I guess. :smack:
I heard, ages ago, that the reason many house cats will “play” with mice is because they were separated from their mothers too early, and the mother thus never taught them how to make a killing bite. They don’t quickly dispatch their prey because they simply don’t know how.
Yup, between the mice, the cockroaches and the giant horseflies this place was a real wet dream to live in… :rolleyes: All it had in its favor was the astoundingly low rent.
I don’t think they play with them because they don’t know how to kill them, I think it’s just because they aren’t hungry enough to look at them as food. Hungry cats will kill quick and munch 'em down–well fed spoiled rotten housecats play with them. They kill quick enough when another cat tries to take their toy away, I can tell you that!
Sorry, but I have it on the highest authority that the Flying Spaghetti Monster had nothing to do with this one… He touched me with his noodly appendage and told me so!
No, that happened when I had the bad cess to catch a large rat in a glue trap. There I was, buck nekkid, 0300, in the kitchen with this giant panicked rat running around shitting mightily with the glue trap stuck to its ass. I’m whacking at it with a broom, trying to get it out the door or into a bag or dead or ANYTHING, really, and after it finally tore itself loose and escaped through the hole it had gnawed in my baseboard I look around to see Stiggs calmly sitting on his fat fuzzy butt watching the whole scene and giving me this insouciant “Well, you certainly didn’t handle THAT very well, did you?” look. It speaks volumes about my love for my cat that he survived this episode.
Next day I threw a buttload of rat bait under the laundry room floor, nailed sheet metal over the spots where the rat had chewed its way in, and cheered mightily when the dog killed the fucker and left it on the back porch.
I don’t know to this day why I thought a glue trap was a good idea–I’m usually much smarter than that! :smack:
My two were shelter cats, so it wouldn’t surprise me - they told us they were 8 weeks old, but I’d be surprised if they were over 6 when we took them home - they were very little.
Coincidentally, they killed a mouse in our apartment the second night my roommate and I had them. They’ve had three opportunities to kill mice in their short lives (the apartment, the time I had two stowaway mice from the airport in my suitcase after visiting ElzaHub during a flood - before we were married, and this last one), and they’ve killed each one. Oddly enough, I’m pretty sure it’s my timid little girl cat who’s been doing the killing - my boy’s followed her around when she’s gone after them.
And I didn’t realize it, but he found the mouse on Friday morning - so we haven’t seen any since then - and Thursday night was the night it got VERY cold outside, so the little guy was probably just trying to find some warmth. He probably did find a little warmth, but it was from the cats sitting on him.
I believe female housecats are much better mousers than toms. In this respects cats resemble lions. It’s the females job to hunt and kill the game. The males job is to lay around and look important.
So this is an example of William Paley’s The Palpable Benevolence of Nature in God’s Design?
Now, if you were talking about cats killing pigeons, that would be a different story entirely. Bloody things deserve the worst death prayer and human sacrifice can buy.
You can’t blame the pigeons either. They were Intelligently Designed to be flying rats. And your comments are blasphemous. The Intelligent designer looked at all of creation and found it good. You got a problem with that?
Our youngest cat is the real mouser of the house. Got his first kill when he was about 4mo old, during a strange day where we had 3 mice in 24hrs, not a single mouse in 3yrs before then, not one since. He’s very patient, we occasionally get big bugs in the house, in the bathroom, he’ll sit and stare at the place they come from for hours, just waiting for his chance.
We also give cats toys that only respond when they bat them around, like foam balls and catnip mice, so they get used to batting and holding, rather than biting and killing.
Some casts just bite and eat the heads of mice. Apparently they get their minerals, proteins and calcium all in one in that package.
Those that just play endlessly with them are being fed well by their owners, plain and simple. If you want a cat to kill a mouse quicker, feed him less (or give less healthy cat-food, somehow they seem to know this - but in many countries you can’t really buy bad cat-food, the only bad thing about cat food is the amount of preservatives, taste and smell enhancers they put in).
Cats are smart animals, they play with their prey if they are well fed to make sure they stay in shape for when they need to feed again. If the mouse hadn’t gotten a heart-attack he might have gotten away. Cats do very little killing for the kill, which is a good thing. AFAIK, dogs and other canine animals like foxes can go on a real killing spree if the mood strikes them.
I brought one of my cats along to help out a mouse infested friend (the mouse was running over her desk sometimes while she was working on it. :rolleyes: ), and although he was about 3 months old, he got it immediately. But of course he just let it go, caught it, let it go, etc. After ten minutes I had enough and when the cat let it go again and the mouse fled past me, I just stepped on it, killing it instantly. The cat then played with it for 10 more minutes throwing it up in the air like a toy-mouse. But the Norwegian forest cat of my (Norwegian :D) aunt just killed any mouse that came into their home instantly by biting its head off as described above.
Fortunately, we do not have very many scorpions, perhaps 3 or 4 a year, but our two cats make short work of them, as they do other bugs. Odd thing is, when we find one in the morning, all that is left are the legs. Maybe they used them as toothpicks?
