To think I'm not a crazy person for not letting my cat kill a mouse?

[LokiBear]

My 6 mo kitten just bought in a mouse, still alive, and proceeded to to toy with it as cats do. I tried to get him and he shot out of the back door. I chased him captured my kitten, made him drop the mouse and then after checking it over, walked the live, uninjured mouse to a nearby field away from my furry monster! My husband thinks I'm ridiculous. I'm not am I? I understand cats kill mice. It is nature, I get it. That is fine. However, I can't sit back and WATCH them kill a little mouse. My husband is practically splitting his sides laughing at my 'stupidity'. Someone back me up!

Not mad at all, I save as many mice and birds as I can, I can't sit by and watch one be played with, tortured and killed.

If my cat brings back a dead mouse I just tidy it up.

If it's alive, I remove cat from room and then proceed to entertain my husband, trying to catch the mouse/bird/bat/shrew my delightful cat has brought in to make me a better hunter, before putting them back out.

So no you are not unreasonable

YANBU,

our cats don't really hunt but when they do they're always alive. Straight back to the fields they go!

No, YANBU. You can't always stop cats killing small furry critters, but it's worth saving the ones you can, I think. Yes, it is probably pretty daft and pointless, but that doesn't make it an unreasonable thing to do, IMO.

Not crazy at all - I've even picked a rat up in the past to save it Hate to think of any animal being killed.

A friend of ours whose cat brought a live mouse in proceeded to shoot it I just don't know why the fuck he would do that but he maintains that he was perfectly reasonable

Yanbu. Watch cat wars on bbc iplayer at the moment. Thank you for saving this mouse x

Thank you! I'm going to wave this in DH'S face!

Not mad at all! Me and mum used to save whenever possible. A lot of the time we never got the chance, just entrails and a tail on the patio but sometimes they brought mice/voles/birds back and toyed with them.

Frightened birds are really hard to capture and release ;-(

Do you have a bell on the cat? That cut down a little on the small animal deaths from ours.

Cats bring in live prey because they want YOU, as part of their unit, to kill the small squeaky thing. Its a cute yet disgusting way of showing you they love you.

I tend to chivvy OldDessertCat back out the door to finish off his catch himself. He has never got one past the back door. Not entirely sure what I would do if it made it into the house proper!

Bells are a good idea! I'd sooner they sat on my knee and snuggled to show that they love me! Furry little monsters!

Oh god...am so glad I am not the only one. I rescued a mouse and thought I was too late. It's little body just lay on my hand making tiny little laboured breaths. Slowly but surely it started to come round and ten minutes later it was actually sat in my hand cleaning its little face. DH came in and didn't say a word. He looked at me looking closely at this dear little scrap as it cleaned itself and just smiled.

I'm a bit on the fence. My old cat brought a lot of animals in over his 10 years (despite having had one leg amputated), including mice, voles, shrews, rabbits, pheasants, bats (?!), moles, rats and on one very memorable occasion he brought in an extremely pissed off weasel. If they were alive, I caught them and took them outside. If they were dead I chucked them in the bin. He did eat some of them...just leaving the spleens - for me to enjoy at my leisure, presumably.

Our new cat is a mighty hunter and eats most things she brings in. Often though she will bring it upstairs to chase around at a hundred miles an hour presumable whilst wearing clogs, judging by the racket until I wake up and have to catch the little beastie in my bare hands whilst still half asleep. I'm quite adept at it by now!

I don't like to see them being caught and played with but I am of the opinion that it's a natural thing to catch and eat them (she will only eat dry food from us). We also live quite remotely and we do have issues with rodents getting into the animal feed and nesting in the haybales so I do think she's doing us a kindness at the same time. Having said that, I found a nest of teenage mice in the grass seed spreader at the weekend and they looked so cute that I took them all down to the woods and released them. There's no hope for me really

*presumably!

Oh, and just for the record - the aforementioned cat that had an amputated leg was due to the fact that he was wearing a collar. It got caught in a branch as he went to jump over a spiked railing fence from a tree and that led to him being impaled on the spike, whilst also hanging by his neck from the branch. I'll never put a collar on a cat ever again

I save them if I can. But I do know that actually you are better off either killing them or letting the cat kill them because they are unlikely to be as uninjured as they look, and also (this particularly applies to birds) are likely or suffer delayed shock and die anyway. Sorry.

And for people with a black sense of humour, may I share that my IPad typed uninsured, rather than uninjured in that post...........

I saved a mole last month from a crow!

YANBU!

All this reminds me why I don't have a cat. Had to put up with three my children rescued as kittens. Luckily they couldn't be arsed to chase anything though.

YANBU. It was kind of you. Also domestic cats killing wild things is not nature; we introduced domestic cats. I don't mind cars eating mice and rats but they are really bad for our bird population :(

I rescue all the victims of cat malevolence that I can. I know they are likely to die from shock but I would rather they got to die relatively peacefully, and on their own terms, than as an unwilling participant in the prolonged game of torture and dismemberment my two furry terrorists favour.

There was a memorable display when they found a mouse nest. Another slasher movie when one climbed a tree to a magpie nest and dropped the contents to the brother lurking beneath. Thankfully they are a bit too elderly now for the full on ritualistic killings, but we do have a talented local hawk who is happy to oblige.

YANBU - I rescued a toad from our cat the other day! Unfortunately the mice that she catches are usually quite badly hurt by the time we get to them, & she doesn't finish them off efficiently - it's been down to DH & me to put them out of their misery. Grim.

We have no small garden birds on our estate anymore ( loads when it was first built). Every other house has cats.
We only have pigeons and magpies now.

YANBU. Our cats bring in a lot of little corpses and sometimes little squeaky victims (usually voles or shrews since we live in the countryside). DP and I do our absolute best to save the live ones - we're a well-practiced team, with me grabbing the cat and him rescuing the little creature. Sometimes they're quite far-gone with fear, and these we pop into a shoe box with some straw to recover their equilibrium - some recover but others sadly die, I suppose from a heart attack.

We both feel really happy when we save one, and really sad if they die in the box instead of recovering.

I never let ours bring in live creatures and kill them. Who wants mouse guts on the floor, or for them to run into some small crack, or into something, then you spend ages trying to get it out. Or put up with a cat going crazy all night because they can hear it but not reach. Eventually you sniff that sweet specially smell, see the flies and have to fish out a rotting corpse. I speak from experience.