Does anyone know of a way to stop your cat from bring dead (and half dead) things into the house?
My cat is brilliant; loving and affectionate and wonderfully patient with DS. He's very much an outdoor cat though, and has an electronic cat flap that reads his chip, and he comes and goes as pleases him. I don't think keeping him indoors will work, and it seems massively unfair to trap him in the house with a rampaging nearly-toddler when he is used to having his freedom.
The problem is just that he's started bringing things in again. He has form for hunting - two live magpies in my living room, lots of dead/half dead/fully alive mice, little birds etc. But it seemed to have stopped over the past year. In the past week we have had - one dead mouse in the morning, the next day there was another one, the day after that there were two dead mice, and the day after that there was a dead rat. He is single handedly decimating the local wildlife and I am terrified that one day I am going to come downstairs and not see one and DS is going to pick it up.
Is there anything I can do to stop this? I've read up on why he might be doing it - from finding his own food (though he doesn't eat them), to leaving us gifts, to showing us how to hunt to trying to feed our baby etc. I don't know how much truth there is behind them, and it's probably just that he's a cat and they hunt stuff, it's their nature, right? We tried a collar with a bell, but he can get them off and we never see them again. We can't really keep him indoors, and please no one suggest getting rid of him, he's my first baby and I can't bear the thought of that.
What to do? Do I just have live with it?
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Cats and Hunting
8 replies
EasilyBored · 11/12/2012 14:49
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