One of the joys of sharing your home with a cat.

pongo brought lizard and mice and even abat live
kept them for playing with them for night hunts

vegansrock

www.onlycat.com/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22188945027&gbraid=0AAAAAq4YoD_shP-sugzlZtxyzf4bXIm2_&gclid=Cj0KCQjw7IjOBhDyARIsAFzrWQxKMJt1jgzAIb_pJE6H2EDA_WjQNLJGnhGl5SK3IaR-RfbTDi3wL-4aAjd_EALw_wcB

Thank you vegansrock. I think this might be what I need.

We rescued a homeless huge tabby cat. Soft as muck, but a good hunter. His pièce de résistance was a fully grown stoat, which he left in the kitchen for me.

It's been a while since I had a cat but I still managed to have a field mouse under my divan bed this winter - I assume it came in through an open window!

My daughter has a pair of brothers from the RSPCA. One is a fanatical hunter, the other rarely leaves the garden, but enjoys playing with anything thing his brother brings home. She never knows what surprises will be lurking on the stairs, on in the kitchen! Recently she found so much blood in the kitchen that she had to examine both cats to make sure they hadn't been injured. I'm glad to say that my last remaining cat is now to old to catch anything.
I'm very impressed by the stoat Georgesgran They are so incredibly fast and so very ferocious.

son sent me this, he is the car fan, and it is spot on alas for daily gifts.

cat fan not car fan, duh.

The cat I had in an old house cornered a small rat (from the covered water course at end of the garden) but was scared to pounce. It was a stand off so I got a pudding basin and plonked it on just in time.

Thankfully (for me) Deedaa it was dead, but Alfie was a big cat, who had been forced to live rough for a while, before he turned up at our back door late one night. He brought all sorts home, usually rabbits - I think he’d backed through the cat flap and dragged the stoat through. He’d made no attempt to disembowel or eat it.

Me too Bazza , a cat flap is a definite NO NO!!!!! in our house.

My son has a cat flap with a camera built in. It detects the cats face and won't open if anything is in its mouth. It works well no mice brought in since. They are on Amazon for sale but aren't cheap. He was getting several mice every night before he installed it. None now. And no other cats can enter either

Great if you can afford £400!

Those on here who aren't cat people may well get the wrong idea, in our experience (cat #8 now in residence, #1 was about 30 years ago), the vast majority of cats do NOT decimate the wildlife population.

In their younger days, they like to play with the likes of mice, and in the nesting season, crashed baby birds may not survive the attentions of a nosey cat (BUT predator birds like magpies and sparrowhawks actually wipe them out in huge numbers!).

But the older cat, well, most are really too idle to bother. The attractions of regular meals served by obliging hotel staff far outweigh all that effort to catch something that doesn't taste that nice. It DOES help if the humans play with their cats, to keep them amused and 'in training', therefore no need to go rushing about in the garden?

There is a myth, spread by frankly delusional 'researchers', that the falling numbers of many British birds is due to domestic cats. This is demonstrably nonsense. The starling is well-known, in gardens, and they roost in towns and cities. Their numbers are down some 70%? Cats were declared to be the problem. EXCEPT, starlings go out to feed in fields in the daytime (you will see some in suburban gardens, that's just a subset), then they return to their roosts, with a well-known evening display in some locations (a 'murmuration'). Just HOW have cats decimated the starling??? If they were climbing the roost trees in towns and cities, to wipe out large quantities of birds, they'd have been spotted. If busloads of cats had been venturing to the countryside, armed with machine guns to mow down vast numbers of birds, I think they'd have been noticed. So, "no", as they used to say on 'Call My Bluff', "not that, what's the true definition"? Try habitat loss and pesticides.

Three cats back we had a big old ginger boy, liked to be outside a lot, but really idle. The local garden birds (we have always had maybe 7 or 8 feeders), got to know him, and took little notice when he strolled by. Any new birds presumably got told not to give the 'alarm call', "that's old Ginger, he's OK". We'd even have him coming in with bird poop on him, if he'd nodded off under any of the feeders. For a while he lived with a female cat, the birds didn't trust her, so if she went down the garden, their sentries raised the alarm, and kept a careful eye on her whereabouts.

I DO accept that a minority of cats like to bring back 'presents' (sadly, they can't go to the off-licence for something more suitable) but quite often those gifts are alive (see the stories on here!). We had one very clumsy old girl who managed to bring a mouse back, (it must have asked for directions, or she couldn't have caught it), and dropped it in the kitchen. Cue about 3 hours of us trying to catch the wretched thing, watched by 2 highly amused felines.

I once woke up to my cat gently feeding me a live mouse. That was the last time I had cats sleep in my bedroom.

I don't let my cats outside anymore. It was easier in England.
But here we have eagles, owls and other raptors let alone foxes, cayotes and bears, sometimes. Doesn't stop them rodents trying to infiltrate!

My friend had a cat . Her husband worked away and she was home alone with the children. She heard a lot of banging and crashing downstairs and thinking she was being burgled called the police . Two policemen arrived quickly and they quietly opened the kitchen door . The cat from next door came rushing out . He had come through the cat flap in pursuit of the remains of the KFC they had had for tea . He had knocked over the bin and trashed the kitchen . My friend was very embarrassed but the policemen had a good laugh

Yes cats do know right from wrong
Years ago I came home to find a dead bird on the patio. Assuming that my cat was to blame I pushed his nose onto it and shouted that he was a very naughty boy. He slunk off in disgrace. A few days later I came home to see him slinking towards me on his tummy ears down, looking very guilty and there was another dead bird on the patio. This happened a couple more times until I discovered that they were flying into the patio door. I did apologise to said cat!

Aww poor puss. My sister once had a lovely wee corgi who always took the blame for everything. No matter who was in trouble - and it was never her - she'd cringe with flattened ears exuding apologies.

My cats have brought in squeaky presents in the past allowing one mouse to set up home in my duster drawer. I got a humane mouse trap and baited it with peanut butter, two days later the mouse was caught and subsequently released into the wild. In the interim I’d restrict the cat’s access to the rest of the house at night

Going to the loo very early one morning a few years ago I noticed a goldfish on my landing just under the window. The one I left open for my cat to come in and out. The fish was dry and looked quite dead so I put it down the loo and had a wee. I don’t usually flush the loo early in the morning except if I do a number two,so I went back to bed.
Got up in the morning to the fish merrily swimming around in my loo.
I got it out and put it in my fish tank that held only one of those glass cleaning fish thingies.
I told my sil later in the day and she related the story to my neighbour who she works with. The fish turned out to be from her fishpond so I took it down to her later in the day. It was funny at the time and everyone now says my wee is the elixir of life.

Paying cat tax (I hope!) our new arrivals

Oh good, it worked. Bob and Wee Bert.

Oh I want those two little darlings❤️

Our little calicos. Only one of them actually catches things, the other one just watches!

My little cat is unwell this morning having thrown up twice since yesterday afternoon. He is very lethargic and not eating or drinking. I will take him to the vet this afternoon. Common sense says it’s nothing serious but I am a season catastrophiser, so am imagining the worst. Anyway, fingers crossed.

Seasoned……doh!