This evening has been a fairly typical one, our seven month old miniature poodle brought in several shards of broken flower pots that our cats had knocked off the garden wall. The hunter cat then brings in a young rat and starts playing football with it. Dog wants rat, so cat (with rat) jumps to a place that the dog can’t reach . Not wishing to be outdone, our enterprising poodle goes back into the garden and returns with a perfectly coiled dead adder (OH now screaming ’ “There’s rats and snakes - Do something!”).
Meanwhile our other cat is watching apparntly transfixed, but also disdainfully as its brother knocks the dying rat around my library. No point in trying to intervene and dispose of the rat until cat has lost interest (but also OH doesn’t want rat blood on her mother’s antique Persian carpets).
Eventually hunter cat gets bored and returns to the garden, superior cat now begins playing with what remains of the rat (tail and one hind leg). Hoping the rat hadn’t been poisoned by a neighbour, I scrape up what’s left onto a dust pan and from the balcony catapult it into the Lot.
We have had nothing like the chaos at your house Mark! We moved here with our now departed small English tabby, and never had a mouse in the house while he was around. He used to climb on the roof and sit for hours on the ridge tiles surveying his fabulous empire, a complete reversal of his miserable life in a UK garden, being chased and having his tail bitten by the big bad cats of the neighbourhood. He ate or brought us many mice, voles, the hind quarters of a lerot, baby rabbits and once, a rat. Any entrails he didn’t like were left by the garage door. Birds were left by the back door. One morning we found a mole, dead but untouched, outside the bedroom door - a little furry cushion. But he couldn’t abide snakes (or the dog) and one day had a face-off with a large green lizard who definitely won the staring competition.
I have had four cats in the last decade (two I adopted and two, maybe three, adopted us) Not one of them caught a rodent within the house (thank goodness) but anything that moved outside the house was fair game
A friend once watched his cat drag a seagull through the cat flap
Eric being 16 years old does not do much nowadays, but he has brought us a family of farm cats to stay on the farm.
One of them is now his girlfriend the old devil, Eric has his own bedroom in the stables away from our pesky dog Dolly, all mod cons with king size bed, couch, food hall and toilet (litter tray) with piped music and a servant/butler me.
Girlfriend has moved in (she is the only one to have worked out the cat flap) and dotes on him, she is getting friendlier by the day and does not like cat food just cat biscuits, mum stays next door in a cat bed in the garage and sister has a bed in the loft above her sister.
The butler puts out biscuits and water for them every day, like a good butler should.
We’ve had snakes (adders) brought in alive but battered and extremely pissed off. In the UK, one of our cats brought in a live pigeon, and a live grey squirrel . That was fun…not
I suppose all of the above is why I have never been a cat person, although I did appreciate and make a fuss of One-Eye when she used to saunter through the house uninvited.
My Breton/Collie X Rupert brought me a baby robin, plucked from its nest, one day. Very gently and thus it was completely unharmed and I put it back while blocking off the nest. Our Setter, Tosca, once brought me an injured Jay, again very gently and I tried to help it with water and a safe place to stay, but it died in the night.
My dogs are not adopted/fostered for their wildlife kindness though. Gentle Lira the Greyhound was a cat-killer and dominant with it, to the extent that she ‘commanded’ gentle Match, the Spaniel, to hold one end while she stretched its neck at the other, and a string of visiting Dobermanns (including the current, Jules), have largely banished cats from the garden. ;-(
