My parents’ cats have a definite pecking order. Until recently, there were three of them: George (an older male, who just died a few weeks ago), Lady, and Petunia (both females, and younger than George.) All are spayed/neutered. George was the unquestioned boss of the cats; both of the girls would always let him eat first, and generally defer to him. Lady is the alpha female. She’s been around the house longer than Petunia has, and she was good friends with George. She bullies around Petunia a lot, no doubt to maintain her superior position. Petunia is the new cat, and as such is at the bottom of the totem pole. She avoids Lady as much as possible.
For cripes sake keep your bedroom door closed. My experience of nestling down on my pillow to discover the back end of a rat lovingly placed there… I have always wondered if that’s the best half of a rat to eat - never tried it though!
We had a male cat that would bring his kills to the front porch, then yowl and howl until we came to the porch. Then he would continue to yowl and howl until we assured him that he was a handsome and brave and skilled hunter, and what an excellent kill he had made. While we were praising him, he would purr and preen and lick himself. Then he would pick up his victim and audibly crunch it, and only then we were allowed to go back to bed. He was awesome.
Yes, the criteria is greek gods with names ending with an “s” (beacuse of the s-sound cats listen to). So I got Hermes, Artemis, Thetis and Dionysos. – But now I two kids and yet another one on the way, so four cats is more than enough for now. (Also, I’m running out of names that fills the criteria.)
It’s a maternal thing. She’s teaching you how to kill.
It could be worse, it could be gloves.
http://www.boston.com/news/odd/articles/2006/07/20/cat_burglar_suspect_in_garden_glove_thefts/
Above the line is a sign that says, in words and pictures, “Our cat is a glove snatcher. Please take these if yours.”
On Thursday morning, nine pairs of gardening gloves and five singles were strung up, nicely framed by the Pifers’ flourishing tomato and basil plants. Willy, looking innocent, was playing with a beetle under the Subaru in the driveway and occasionally dashing after Hudson.
“This all started about the time people began working in their gardens, I guess March or April,” Jennifer Pifer said. “Willy would just show up with a glove, or we’d see them on the front steps. I guess it’s better than if he was bringing home dead birds.”
…
“Jennifer was telling me all about how Willy was bringing home all these gloves, and there was a small pile of them outside the door, and then here comes the cat with a glove in its mouth, proud as could be, like he was giving me a gift.”
Some of the gloves really are gift-worthy.
“A lot of these looked brand new,” said Pifer. “Some of them are really nice.”
She doesn’t know how far afield Willy goes to find a glove, but she has learned it takes him two trips to bring home a matched pair."
The cat I grew up with was an indoor/outdoor cat. She would catch rabbits on a regular basis. Rather than leave the corpes on the porch, she would leave only one ear and one eyeball! Maybe she thought there was a bounty on rabbits, and she was trying to collect 
I once heard a comedian talking about this. He was mocking a TV commercial for cat food, in which the voiceover claimed that the cat food was available in “The flavors your cat naturally craves!” One of these flavors was beef. The comedian asked, “Cats ‘naturally crave’ beef? Tell me, when was the last time you saw a housecat running down a cow?”
One of my favorite lines from Garfield:
“When a cat brings you a dead smelly thing, it’s a expression of love, you twit!”
I didn’t say they were inefficient-(although my cats certainly are!), I said they were cruel. Not deliberately, of course, but just the same, I kinda feel bad for the mice. Not enough to want them in my house, though.
I can’t believe they used “feline felon” in the headline instead of “cat burglar”.
She obviously ate the best part herself as a treat.
My cats are indoor-only, but every year they get some stupid, desperate rodent foolish enough to come in here. Most of the time they give me the head and they hide the rest of it, though I’ve also gotten internal organs. I’m pretty sure this is a gesture of respect and not them telling me I can’t hunt. I’ve seen my cat Shadow teach a neighbor’s kitten how to hunt (when he was someone else’s outdoor cat). He would bring the kittens still-living but disabled rodents and show the kittens how to kill them. Conversely, I never see the live prey, only the dismembered bits. I think it’s the house’s 15%.
Actually, neutered is a generic term for males and females. It’s more commonly used as such outside of the US. If you want to get gender specific, it’s spayed and castrated. But…most people don’t really like saying ‘castrated’ for some reason. Perhaps de-testicalized is more proper?
The preferred euphemism used to be “altered,” I believe.
I see. So the “correct response” is to make the cat feel good about killing birds that it doesn’t even need to eat for food, and this is appropriate because, (Og forbid!) we wouldn’t want to “offend or confuse” the little darling. That would be just too, too cruel.
Do we have our priorities straight here?
We have three ‘altered’ barn cats and I’m not sure this thread is the appropriate forum in which to describe the carnage on our porch some mornings.
Our crack mousing team has been so efficient over the past 8 years that they have quite nearly run themselves out of employment. Those rats and mice brave enough to climb into the grain bin in the fall aren’t given the opportunity to reproduce, making our barn rodent-free most of the year. Also, the barn swallows tremble in fear.
But the fields and streams seem to provide ample hunting ground and we generally find at least one offering each morning. The offerings fit nicely into three distinct categories, and I think I’ve finally found a way to identify which cat is bringing which kill:
Jackson, who came to us 9 years ago without claws (he’d been so altered to fit his former owner’s lifestyle) leaves ‘just the tummies’, according to my 6 year-old son. He is a fierce and voracious hunter and we often remark that Jackson with claws would have made for an unfair imbalance in the natural world. We get lots and lots of mouse tummies.
Squeak came to us as a 5 week old orphan, really too young to be without a cat mom, and her hunting style supports what an earlier poster wrote about cruel killing habits arising from insufficient maternal guidance. She leaves the whole animal, apparently unmolested, with no obvious cause of death. Often they’re not dead at all. This spring she brought us an entire mouse nest…7 little mouse fetus-things all blindly writhing and gasping on my doorstep. When my younger son was 2, he picked up and carried for (I don’t really know how long) a terrified little field mouse which had been tossed on the porch by a bored Squeak who then probably swished her bushy tail off to the field to find another plaything.
Which leaves Bridgette. Our skiddish one who only comes out for cuddles once the children are in bed. She must be the one leaving the faces, and I refuse to thank her for the gift. A few times a week I’ll find a mouse face staring up at me from the doormat, it’s little nose pointing skyward, it’s ears tucked into corners of the whole in which it is lodged. Christ. If you don’t know it’s the remains of a kill, you’d think the mouse is climbing up into the mat through the floorboards below.
Praising this behavior is correct only in the sense that it is the natural response the cat is looking for. Personally, I prefer to play the role of raging omnipotent cat god, so I never praise them, choosing instead to growl fiercely at them while I’m cleaning tummies and faces out of the holes in the doormat.
Evolution will save the little mousies, I predict. In another 10,000 years, mice will have evolved the instinct to “play dead.” Natural selection by bored felines.
Well, no- the “correct response” would be (excpt for barn cats, of course) to leave your cat indoors(which I said in my 1st post). But if you insist on letting your cat outdoors, it will hunt ( I *did *suggest a bell very early also) it’s natural. And when your cat does something natural then makes a gesture of love towards you- you damn well say “thank you”.
You damn well do, do you? Why’s that?