Written as part of a discussion online this evening about cats not catching mice…
Our cats are really quite good at catching mice. Then bringing them into the house and releasing them. Literally five minutes ago I heard a cat thundering down the corridor upstairs followed by my daughter screeching. One of the cats had caught a mouse and brought it in, taken it upstairs and released it on her bed, which she was in at the time 😀
Fortunately I managed to catch it and put it back outside.
One of our previous cats once brought in a live rat. It managed to climb up the back of the (upright) freezer in our utility room and crawled inside a cardboard tube that had been left on top. Possibly not the best choice from the rat’s point of view. There’s still a ding on one of the wall cupboards where the air rifle pellet came out the other end 😀 I was kind of assuming that a rat body might stop an air rifle pellet. Not at a range of half a metre, apparently.
The most bizarre thing we’ve ever had brought in however was an entire nest full of pheasant chicks that we found under the kitchen table — chicks still alive though obviously there wasn’t really anything we could do for them. I still have no idea how that got through the cat flap.
Back when I was seven or eight years old my parents’ Siamese brought in a grass snake and left its corpse under one of the chairs in the sitting room. That was quite pleasant too.
