My guess would be a 5 year old sociopath. 
I thought the internal organs were the tastiest parts? Not speaking personally here.
The liver and heart might be. However, if it’s a small herbivore the predator might not want to eat the stomach and intestines if they are filled with plant material.
But a side salad goes so well with liver!
Or the bile duct, which can be incredibly nasty-tasting even to a dedicated predator. Same with the bladder.
I had a hunter-cat years ago who would do exactly this - eat almost the entire north end of his prey, but leave parts of the south end intact. On my kitchen floor, quite often, so I’d step on the entrails on the way to the coffee pot.
Ah, the old Cattle Mutes scenario!
My cat used to leave this kind of present in the bath tub almost nightly. My corgi got in the habit of checking first thing in the morning. By the time I got up, if lucky, there would just be a stain left. Or a set of rodent teeth.
I also vote for cat. My cats have all done this.
We used to have a cat who would catch bats and eat everything except the guts and the wings. He would also eat all of a rabbit except for the guts and the feet. We now have a cat who will eat the rabbit from the waist forward.
They are following some of the rules, but you should tell them that rabbits aren’t remotely kosher.
Not eating the gall bladder makes sense since bile is nasty,* and the large intestine is gross, but most dogs would be like Ulfreida’s and scarf it up. Little stays in a dog’s mouth long enough for them to taste it.
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- You know it’s time to get your gall bladder out when the dry heaves turn into the green heaves because you are puking so hard you’re squeezing bile past the obstruction, through your small intestine and stomach, and out your mouth. And you don’t care because the pain goes away.
I know this is an old thread, but there aren’t exactly a whole bunch of recent, appropriate threads to choose from. Thank God.
John Mace, you don’t know how happy I was to find this thread. (And finding it just goes to show that you really can find ANYTHING on the Internet.)
With the exception of location – I’m in New England – your post describes exactly the lovely little package I found on my walkway as I went to the car this morning.
No other critter parts to be found, just the entire internal organ set. No overhanging tree branches: if this was dropped by an owl or raptor, it would have had to have flung it at least 15 feet horizontally from the closest tree branch.
I guess I will convince myself that this was indeed the handiwork of a domesticated cat that happened upon an unlucky bunny. I certainly prefer that theory to being targetted by an obscure, suburban voodoo cult. :eek:
You’re going to fit in quite nicely around here…
So that’s what the green wobbly bit is!
Another vote for cat. Ours deposits little gut packages on our walkway. It is astonishing her ability to carefully separate the meat from the guts.
You’ll have to taste it to be sure 
My cats catch rabbits - and for reasons that seem to defy explanation, they start with the head. Then they work their way down. Usually, but not always leaving the gut. Sometimes they even eat the green wobbly bit. But they seem to dislike the ears and feet. At least sometimes all I will find is a pair of ears and a foot. This morning I was presented with a headless rabbit on the dining room carpet.
What I find astounding is that a cat will sit down and methodically grind up a rabbit skull, and keep going all the way down. One would imagine that more efficient order would be to go for the soft bits first.
It is probably this ability to eat the entire animal, bones, fur and all, but draw the line at the gut that accounts for such neat packages. Of course there may be a truly disgusting hairball thing to be deposited on the kitchen floor sometime in the future that accounts for some of the remains.
Banzai was trained to eat his kill in the bath tub [I got tired of that wet squelchcrunch of stepping on a gift mouse and would grab him and his kill and drop them into the tub and slide the door closed until he was finished eating so he learned to just take them in there without gifting me =) ] He usually left the skull, feet and tail, and whatever organ is greenish purple swirlies and about the size of a kidney bean from mice.
I once encountered the opposite situation: two slabs of flesh, no fur, no bones, no guts. Found it in my backyard, by a cement pathway. One of my cats could have dragged it there, but they don’t leave behind such tidy kills. Extremely weird, especially as I had walked down that path about a half hour previous, and there was nothing there.
I’ve seen a hawk do this on numerous occasions, outside my place in Chicago. It tears apart the meal wherever it catches it. If it’s in a tree, there will be a mess below. If it’s on the ground, it’ll be a neat little packet. Usually pigeons, but squirrels too. It’s fascinating to watch. Nasty, too.
I hope this thread is still active(!).
We found a rabbit, apparently skinned and elongated by some creature, in our back yard last night, when taking the dog out one last time for the day. The head and all feet were intact, but there was no evidence of any loose fur or skin anywhere to be found, on or around the poor bunny. When we first identified that it actually was a rabbit, which took a while by the way based on its condition and the way it was lying, it appeared that the flesh was completely intact. Upon trying to lift it to remove it from the yard so that the dog wouldn’t get into it today, we saw that it’s other side had some chunks removed from the flesh and that organs were exposed. It seemed to be a fresh kill yet, as there was no odor but the bunny was quite rigid, and we’re sure it wasn’t there earlier in the evening.
So my question to you folks in this forum: does that sound like a owl or possibly fox-type kill description? I know I’ve heard an owl hooting in the backwoods behind the house on some or most evenings, and in about the last couple months, we’ve seen a fox crossing the street several houses away. Our dog surely wasn’t involved…
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Any time you see the words “entrails” and the phrase “kinda gross”, a cat is likely to be involved. We had an oudoor-indoor cat when I was growing up and he would do this too.
Back when organ meat used to be more popular among humans they were said to be rich in nutrients; livers are supposed to be a good source of B vitamins for example. I’m surprised that the natural instinct of the cat wouldn’t be to gobble the innards down as well.
For smaller animals like mice they will often eat them whole, starting at the head biting bits off, chewing, and swallowing much as you or I would eat a Danish.