What's your wounded mouse protocol

[felinelucky]

For a bit of a bloater, my cat is a quite efficient hunter. Never eats what he catches, but plays with them endlessly. What do you do when you find a small squeaky or feathery creature that's still alive but clearly isn't going to pull through? I feel like I need a humane killing jar with chloroform or something.

My cat used to bribing them in on a daily basis, most were already dead fortunately. The live ones were quickly dispatched and the deceased mice were tossed onto the lawn which backed onto woodlands. A local crow learned to keep an eye out and would swoop down to collect the mouse before I even made it back inside the house.

@Seafog

I use a butcher knife, one quick whack

Yeah, short of investing in a crow or a Jack Russell (I'm envious - great solutions) I was thinking this would be the best bet. A really sharp knife. I do take pp's point about being mimsy and squeamish about killing when ultimately it's me responsible for an animal suffering. Luckily for me the last two mice have been dead as doornails. The toll seems to rise in hot weather for some reason.

I had a a cat growing up who was a big hunter. He would bring in small field mice and voles and play with them for ages before killing them. We bought a humane mouse trap, so if it managed to get in there, it was safe from the cat and we would release it in the morning.

Unfortunately if it didn't get into the trap, it wouldn't survive. At first, I used to squeeze the back of the cats jaw to force him to open his mouth and drop the mouse so that I could rescue it. He soon got wise to that though, and as soon as he saw me coming he would crunch drown on the mouse 🤢

I bag and brick them. Not a pleasant job, but I'd rather dispatch it quickly than know its suffering.

I have a mallet for this purpose, I hit my toe with the brick once. Bag it first. It's awful but worst to let it stagger around outside half dead until something else catches it. I'd let the cat finish the job but he loses interest (too spoilt/fed)

Well, after presenting me with nothing but neatly laid out corpses for several weeks, I managed to intercept Big Cat with a fully alive mouse. Who proceeded to give me a vigorous bite during the rescue operation. There was blood.