Can't get bird-killer to wear a bell. Any tips?

[Flamingoose]

When I try to put a bell on Boycat it drives him utterly demented. He panics and writhes and I'm scared he'll hurt himself trying to get it off. He's a big cat, and rather unstable, and it just feels cruel to put one on him.

But now he's recently started to kill birds :( He never used to. I found two goldfinches under the table today.

Any tips on getting an extremely highly strung cat to wear a bell?

This tickled me www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/science/brightly-coloured-ruffs-stop-cats-killing-5188627.amp. He will rock this look!

Ha!

Oh god. Just found third corpse of the day. A sparrow this time, poor thing. This is horrible.

What could have caused him to start killing like this? He has never been a killer. He's half blind and has poor balance.

Wrap some paper around the knocker in the bell to muffle the sound initially - it gets them used to having noise around their neck. If it's one of the ball bells, shoving tissue in does a similar thing but is harder to get out!

Are you sure it is him and he's not being framed?

Oh it's definitely him! He might be visually challenged, but he's also 7kg of malevolence and no other cat would make it near the house, let alone have a chance to line up some pretty corpses under his favourite chair.

Anyway, I came back to the thread to update in case anyone searches for anything similar in future; we have him wearing a bell! It turns out that the problem was putting a NEW combination of collar and bell on him. When we added a bell to the collar he was already wearing he didn't love it, but he also hasn't been driven demented. Day 3 and he's kind of used to it. Small bell, very quiet noise, will replace with something louder now we know he can cope.

Are you sure it's him? My serial killer hasn't killed much of late as potential victims have succumbed to the heat.
Maybe your birds are just dying from the weather, assuming they aren't ripped to bits and obvious cat victims?

Radio 4 did a piece on cats and bird predation, even the wildlife expert was forced to concede without predation from cats and birds of prey we'd be knee deep in song birds.

I was going to recommend the ‘brightly coloured ruff ‘ collar but then I saw weaselwords had beaten me to it 😂😂😂 good luck to anyone trying to get one of those on their cat!
Glad you’ve sorted out the bell problem ( it doesn’t seem to stop my little furry killer though 😬)