…and this is a 
Cruel nature
Category: Personal
Posted on: May 15, 2008 11:52 AM, by PZ Myers
If you should ever find yourself in my neighborhood, and were to walk up to my door, I have to warn you: the welcome mat is splattered with blood stains. I didn't do it! No Jehovah's Witnesses are missing from the region! (They never come to my door anymore, anyway.)
We got an unpleasant surprise this morning in that the nest of baby bunnies outside our door was raided, probably by one of the local cats, and the whole family was butchered and laid out on our doorstep. And these bunnies were at that cute stage with fur and big eyes…or at least, they would have been cute if they'd all had heads and their viscera wasn't splayed out everywhere and they weren't lying cold and limp in a pool of blood.
I do have to wonder why, though, whenever there's a scattering of corpses around the house, my family looks to me and expects me to do the clean up.
Comments
"...probably by one of the local cats..."
Yeah. Right. Sure.
Your evil household of god-haters probably murdered those precious creations for some kind of devil worship. Cats indeed.
Posted by: Alex | May 15, 2008 11:59 AM
Dinner is served!
Those cats are just showing you how much they love you. It's their way of saying "I welcome our squiddy overlords. Please eat this before me."
Posted by: Schmeer | May 15, 2008 11:59 AM
Because you're a scientist, and science leads to killing people?
Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2008 11:59 AM
Or at least efficient ways of disposing of the remains.
Posted by: PZ Myers | May 15, 2008 12:00 PM
Get back to us when for the second year in a row you are removing decking boards from the back porch to remove a decomposing and quite ripe opossum. Been there. Done that. Have the t-shirt!
Those poor bunnies.
In a somewhat related note - old hunting licenses from the 1950's in the south had a clause about it practically being the hunter's duty to shoot cats.
Posted by: WRMartin | May 15, 2008 12:03 PM
Ah, Rockwellian small-town life, red in tooth and claw.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 15, 2008 12:04 PM
http://www.howtogetridofstuff.com/stain-removal/how-to-get-rid-of-blood-stains
Posted by: Philippe | May 15, 2008 12:04 PM
That is just what cats do.
I have had several cats and live in a rural area teeming with voles, rabbits, birds, and other small furry litte varmints. They really do like to leave you "presents".
Now as far as cleaning up the mess, that is what you train the kids for along with lawn care and vehicle maintenance. If you haven't taken the time to train them up for these tasks, then you are allowing them to miss some of the best parts of life (grin). If you don't have any kids etc, then try to borrow or lease some from the neighbors.
"The cat that is kissing you lovingly, has just devoured
a rabbit and has left the entrails under the bed."
- Unknown
Posted by: Jorge666 | May 15, 2008 12:04 PM
Is there a reason why cats do that, though? (Not EAT, but lay the corpses in doorsteps.) The same happened to me, I got home one time and there was the half-eaten corpse of a pigeon on my doormat.
Posted by: andy o | May 15, 2008 12:04 PM
That's nothing. My dog drags home various deer parts all winter long. My job is to take them away from her and toss them into the garden, which is surrounded by a six-foot fence; a fence that was, ironically, built to keep the deer out.
She dragged home a deer head once. A fresh one. They're heavy when full.
Posted by: MerryAtheist | May 15, 2008 12:05 PM
"I do have to wonder why, though, whenever there's a scattering of corpses around the house, my family looks to me and expects me to do the clean up."
...You've had corpses scattered around often?
Posted by: Buzz Buzz | May 15, 2008 12:05 PM
Yeah, at work, because I wasn't the squeamish one, I became the designated mouse trap emptier. I really didn't appreciate the role. Wish everybody else would have just grown up a little bit and taken care of their own s...t. But choose your battles carefully.
Posted by: C Barr | May 15, 2008 12:05 PM
Be glad you are the one to clean up the pile of mangled corpses. As the biologist, you should be happy to get to examine the internal workings of a species that isn't your specialty. If this were a pile of squid, you wouldn't be likely to learn anything, besides the surprising fact that piles of dead squid can be found in Minnesota.
Posted by: Wet Mogwai | May 15, 2008 12:06 PM
#9 - Andy
Is there a reason why cats do that, though? (Not EAT, but lay the corpses in doorsteps.)
It is just the cat's way of making sure you get a piece of the action. Little "Love Droppings".
Posted by: Jorge666 | May 15, 2008 12:09 PM
I just went through something similar, but not quite as grisly. It was probably the local cats who killed a pair of baby squirrels in my front yard. I found their bodies among the rose bushes. Although I like cats, they are killers and that's the sort of thing they do. I realize that squirrels are just rodents with a better PR agency than mice and rats, but it still made me really sad to find the baby squirrels.
No doubt I can blame nature ("red in tooth and claw") and the evil godless Darwin for the slaughter, but perhaps I should pray about it first. Yeah, that'll do a lot.
Posted by: Zeno | May 15, 2008 12:11 PM
Now if the cats would just hunt the Jehovah's Witnesses....
Granted, the mess would be awful.
But you know, it would at least show that there is a God.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Posted by: Glen Davidson | May 15, 2008 12:11 PM
Posted by: alex | May 15, 2008 12:12 PM
You should start your own version of the classic http://www.whatjeffkilled.com
Posted by: BTRIPP | May 15, 2008 12:12 PM
This is why people shouldn't have cats.
Posted by: Joe | May 15, 2008 12:12 PM
You got lucky, the dismembered remains were outside your house.
see: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrwizard/family/rodentkill.html for the alternative
Posted by: Dale Austin | May 15, 2008 12:13 PM
We had a cat and I remember the first thing he ever killed and dragged home was a pigeon. He was barely out of kittenhood so the pigeon was at least half as big as he was.
We were all very impressed and gave him extra treats for his bravery. That's why cats do this, they are showing off their hunting prowess.
Posted by: maxi | May 15, 2008 12:15 PM
Beware! It's a Voodoo priest putting a curse on you!
Posted by: Jorg Willekens | May 15, 2008 12:16 PM
Yeh, my cat does that to except she'll take one bite out of whatever it is that she's killed and then promptly be sick. So I get the fun of cleaning up not just the corpses but a steaming pile of cat vomit.
Posted by: Kate H | May 15, 2008 12:16 PM
A skilled predator, the cat is known to hunt over 1,000 species for food.
Posted by: Dennis N | May 15, 2008 12:17 PM
Cats.
If you give a shit about wildlife, keep 'em indoors and don't subsidize ferals. (I have 2. Love 'em. They stay indoors.)
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 15, 2008 12:18 PM
God, how I hate these godless heathens going after all of our uptight Christian beliefs. You've killed the Easter Bunny, and, like any other librul athiest, you place the blame on the kittens. What next...dredle smashing???
Posted by: JimNorth | May 15, 2008 12:20 PM
Dead animals are only the beginning! (Done the dead seagull, the dead skunk . . . I had a big cat.)
Why do I have to unclog the toilet? De-hair the drain? I don't shed like a yak. Take the car for repairs? I'm a middle school math teacher. What do I know of anti-lock brakes?
Posted by: Enkidu | May 15, 2008 12:20 PM
Our dog is a veritable Goddess of Death when it comes to bunnies, there to wreak horrible bloody bunny vengeance on the unfortunate creatures who find their way into our back yard. One time my wife saw her demolish a bunny nest, in the process throwing up a baby bunny and gulping it down whole like a Tic-Tac.
Posted by: Orac | May 15, 2008 12:23 PM
andy o - I wish I knew that too. Since they can't tell us why they do that of course there's no way of knowing for sure, but my favorite of the explanations that I've heard is that they're trying to show us how to hunt. As in "look, stupid human, this is how it's done".
And I agree that older kids are a good resource when it comes to cute animal corpse cleanup.
Posted by: Barbara_K | May 15, 2008 12:24 PM
No doubt godless Atheists cats you converted.
You heathen
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 15, 2008 12:24 PM
Posted by: 74westy | May 15, 2008 12:25 PM
Ahem! Chip and Dale were chipmunks, not squirrels.
Posted by: Zeno | May 15, 2008 12:29 PM
The cat I grew up with was more of a catch-and-release type. At 3 in the morning, you'd hear this weird, muffled, desperate meowing, so you'd open the door and she'd release whatever it was she had caught (a mouse, grasshopper or a baby bird, most of the time) in the house. 90% of the time, whatever she had caught would be in excellent health.
It wasn't very funny... The mice and the grasshoppers, I was okay with, but these damned cats are really harming the bird population. If I knew then what I know now, we'd never have let her outside.
Hey, has anyone heard about this 9 year old in Greece who had absorbed her own twin... Inside her stomach?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/05/15/international/i045832D00.DTL
Luckily, the 9 year old has fully recovered. I'm sure some fundy somewhere will take this as a sign that the Rapture is near, though.
Posted by: MikeM | May 15, 2008 12:32 PM
"The hounds are all fagged out from yesterday's Jehovah's Witnesses, and we don't want blood all over the lawn again!" -- Sir Henry at Rawlinson End
Posted by: CortxVortx | May 15, 2008 12:32 PM
Posted by: Kevin Anthoney | May 15, 2008 12:33 PM
I used to have the bunny clean-up job as a kid, when we had an indoor/outdoor cat. I'd hear the rabbit's howling at night-yeesh, what an awful sound--an the next day would scour the yard looking for remains. If it was during the day, I was sometimes able to save the babies. We nursed several litters and released them back to nature.
My one outdoor cat now doesn't bring many gifts. A rare bird now and then. But one of my indoor cats is always hunting. And I can tell when she's been successful from the distinctive mewling she sounds from wherever she is in the house. She calls out to me with her mouth full of sock, slipper, (drinking straws are a favorite, as my grandkids play with them and leave them hidden under chairs and such). She plops her catch down in front of me and I dutifully praise her and tell her what a good hunter she is. She'll even "fetch" with those toy mice you buy at the store.
Posted by: karen | May 15, 2008 12:34 PM
Indoor cats are very cool.
Outdoor cats are fair game.
Posted by: smittypap | May 15, 2008 12:34 PM
Twice, my family has prevailed (against my better judgement) and "saved" two victims of our little "death on four legs". Both times they were robins, and both times, they were already mortally wounded. So we saved them from a quick death so they could die quietly.
Usually its voles from Ipo*. She places them just outside the door to the deck, where my wife can step barefoot. Nothing like fresh kill underfoot for that squicky feel.
*ironically, this means "sweetheart" in Hawaiian - she's anything but sweet.
Posted by: True Bob | May 15, 2008 12:35 PM
Unfair! Our cats never gave me any dead baby bunnies.
(Dead mice, voles, bats, and birds, OTOH ...)
Posted by: Andreas Johansson | May 15, 2008 12:39 PM
I will no longer complain about the giant spiders I have lately been forced to kill in my bathroom. I will, however, continue to freak out over indoor banana slugs.
My sister (who has 2 cats) was once sweeping some leaves out of her kitchen. They'd blown in from the porch again but, this time, she noticed something different about two of them. Upon closer inspection, she discovered they were dried bunny ears. Her cats are very efficient killing machines.
Posted by: Eximious Jones | May 15, 2008 12:39 PM
I vote for cats as the perpetrators. They love catching something, making amusement of it, and then mauling it mercilessly for food. A cat with claws is nothing but a wee lion when smaller life forms are about.
Posted by: BlueIndependent | May 15, 2008 12:43 PM
That mess sounds like more than a cat. I have no idea where you are, but do you have coyotes in the area? Maybe foxes?
My sister and brother in live in an area of Southern California *far* from any wild areas, and they have gotten warnings from the city to keep pets in at night due to coyotes. They come down the flood control channels from the less urban areas, and since they are protected, no one can do anything.
Posted by: Quiet Desperation | May 15, 2008 12:43 PM
Channeling Anya/Anyanka: But they were bunnies! Clearly they were massacred by a rival demon gang.
Posted by: SEF | May 15, 2008 12:45 PM
We had a stray cat that took up residence in the warm crawlspaces under our house and eventually became a pet. Brought home all KINDS of animals--quite the huntress. Usually it was mice and chipmunks, but occasionally squirrels, baby rabbits, and even a bat once. She would bring each carcass to the doorstep and meow quite loudly (and proudly) until a person came to see what she had caught.
But whether for good or ill, she never actually left the carcass at the doorstep. No, she was of the "waste not, want not" mindset, and insisted on eating everything she had killed, with the exception of certain innards. If you tried to take the dead mouse or chipmunk away, she'd snatch it up before you'd get there with a dustpan. Not sure if it ended up being more or less traumatic for my family having to clean up piles of entrails daily, rather than the entire mouse bodies they came from.
Sven's right, though. Indoors is best, if possible. But I think that sometimes, a cat who has long lived outdoors (and on his or her own) cannot be retrained as an indoor-only cat. Ours couldn't.
Posted by: kmarissa | May 15, 2008 12:45 PM
Ever wonder how cats actually catch birds? I had a "mighty hunter" cat, and twice I got to watch how she did it.
1) Birds feeding on the lawn. Cat crouches in stalking mode. Cat rushes towards birds. Birds take off in the air. Cat leaps four feet straight up and *bats a bird right out of the air, stunning it*. Stunned bird drops to the ground. Cat lands neatly on her feet, trots over to incapacitated bird, eats.
2) We have a five-foot-high hedge. Cat is standing about three feet from the hedge, ears pricked forward, watching intently. I hear a bird rustle inside the hedge. Cat suddenly makes a leap directly onto the hedge. Cat reaches paw inside the hedge, snags bird (which, of course, cannot fly), drags it up to her mouth. Cat drops from hedge to lawn, crouches down to eat.
I would have found it hard to believe either of those scenarios if I hadn't seen them myself.
Posted by: Hairhead | May 15, 2008 12:46 PM
The cats are warning you, time to pay your protection money, in Tuna!
Posted by: BMcP | May 15, 2008 12:51 PM
Posted by: llewelly | May 15, 2008 12:54 PM
I bet they were pre-cambrian rabbits too!
Posted by: Sigmund | May 15, 2008 12:54 PM
QD (#42):
You're misinformed. Status on coyotes in California (from here):
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 15, 2008 12:57 PM
For the sake of the migratory songbirds, whose numbers have been steadily dropping, best to keep cats indoors.
Posted by: Dr Benway | May 15, 2008 1:00 PM
I've heard a couple of stories over the last couple of years on NPR about the destruction wreaked by outdoor cats on bird populations.
Here's an interesting link on this problem:
http://avianscience.dbs.umt.edu/birdconserv_issues_catbird.htm
The idea of a cat-bib to prevent predation seems a little far-fetched to me. Overfeeding one's cat, on the other hand, seems to do the trick, if my observation of neighborhood outdoor cats tells me anything. A couple of them have become too large for serious hunting anymore (on the downside, they are probably not particularly healthy cats for this).
Posted by: Clare | May 15, 2008 1:01 PM
The cats are probably showing you homage. If they see you cleaning it up, they may leave a bigger present next time...
Posted by: Tiranna | May 15, 2008 1:03 PM
Anyone who has seen the creation myth in the first five minutes of "Watership Down" knows that rabbits are just fulfilling their place in the Divine Order by allowing themselves to be slaughtered by cats. Amen.
Posted by: Kingasaurus | May 15, 2008 1:04 PM
By Kliban:
Love to eat them mousies
Mousies what I love to eat.
Bite they little heads off
Nibble on they tiny feet.
Set to music
Posted by: Zeno | May 15, 2008 1:04 PM
One of my two cats specialized in bringing home snakes.
Ranging in size from 6" to ~2'. All gartar snakes, all perfectly alive, and all survived since I'd put a box over them until the cats lost interest and went elsewhere. (I like to believe they viewed the snake as a some sort of self-propelled shoelace cat toy.)
Their other great joy was leaving pieces of large brown field crickets all over the basement.
Given their upbringing all their hunting skills were self-taught. They got pretty good after a while, with the occasional mistep such as trying to chase turkeys one day.
They've shifted totally indoors now with age and a change of venue from suburbs of Pittsburgh to the center of Philadelphia. The days of volleymouse in the snow are past.
Posted by: Kurt | May 15, 2008 1:05 PM
I used to practice veterinary emergencies in a semi-rural locale. Every spring there would be at least one tender hearted person who would bring in a baby bunny which had been half skinned. I tried to save a couple. Never worked. My technician had an appropriate saying:
"baby bunny = natures Big Mac"
Julia
Posted by: julialink | May 15, 2008 1:05 PM
Yeah, But! Why would the neighborhood cat's be paying homage to you? Is there something going on in that neighborhood you're not telling us?
Posted by: Ouchimoo | May 15, 2008 1:08 PM
While living in downtown San Francisco with Maguro Quat, my nut-house cat (the moral equivalent of a junk-yard dog), it was not unusual to find a dead mouse carefully displayed in front of her food bowel for me to admire. More troublesome were the live birds she would catch & release in the apartment (she had been declawed before someone abandoned her near the Psych hospital I worked at).
Later on, when we moved to Kenwood & into a 4 human, 6 cat, 1 dog, 1 parrot & 2 duck household, the hunting duties were taken up by CTHULU . . . The Devourer of Voles, who often left little trails of headless pocket gophers & moles along the entry sidewalk.
Posted by: Jaycubed | May 15, 2008 1:09 PM
For a couple of years, my family lived on the edge of Redlands, California. Our house was L-shaped, with no door between the two wings; we had to walk along the patio from our bedrooms to the kitchen / living room.
My bedroom door was the closest to the inside corner of the house. For whatever arcane feline reason, our cats left their kills right outside it. We called the slab of concrete at my doorstep "the Slaughter Stone". At least a couple of mornings a week I would wake up, dress, and be greeted (on my way to the kitchen and breakfast) by fresh offerings of various types. Usually rats, young possums, rabbits and the like, in assorted stages of dismemberment.
I liked cats then and still do. But they are killers, as many here have acknowledged. And they definitely enjoy it, too. It would be my guess that predators that derive pleasure from "playing" with prey do so because it rewards them teaching themselves and their young?
Posted by: wright | May 15, 2008 1:10 PM
Kurt, "with the occasional mistep such as trying to chase turkeys one day."
Please, do explain.
Posted by: Philippe | May 15, 2008 1:12 PM
My dog torments, chases, teases, and eventually devours ice cubes, a clear sign of a designer...
CL
http://www.coulterlewkowitz.com
Posted by: CL | May 15, 2008 1:24 PM
Um ...
Are you sure it was cats? And not, say, a nice creationist or some similar loon?
If it happens again, contact the police.
...
Re: Julialink "I used to practice veterinary emergencies in a semi-rural locale."
I was visiting the local vet in a small town in California some years back, and in the waiting room was a small boy who'd brought in his pet rat. Apparently the rat had a tumor, and the boy had brought it back hoping the treatment from a previous visit had helped. The vet walked out into the waiting room to take a look, but 10 seconds after he picked it up to examine it, the receptionist called out a question to him from her desk. The guy was known to be tone-deaf to how much people loved their pets, but he set a new record when he called back to her in a distracted voice: "I'll be right with you after I kill this rat."
Posted by: Hank Fox | May 15, 2008 1:24 PM
>>my family looks to me and expects me to do the clean up
Mine always does too. What evolutionary purpose could that possibly serve?
Posted by: Somnolent Aphid | May 15, 2008 1:25 PM
i have anecdotal evidence to support this. a neighbor's cat was the terror of all, leaving several wiggling "presents" on the doorstep daily. well, one weekend my neighbor went hunting and returned with a deer. after hanging and curing the deer outside his door, the cat *never* left another wiggler: she realized that us hairless apes can bring down prey she could only dream of
Posted by: skyotter | May 15, 2008 1:25 PM
A friend once told me that he didn't understand Darwin's preoccupation with the cruelty of nature, as if it was a non-issue not worth considering. I was dumbfounded by his narrow-mindedness. That friend later turned out to be an obsessive closet Catholic. Go figure.
Posted by: Jay | May 15, 2008 1:28 PM
His eye is on the sparrow, ... but not the rabbits.
Posted by: hje | May 15, 2008 1:30 PM
Well, I just realized I must chip in with the "household pet vs nature" anecdote.
Our chocolate labrador, Cosinus, once tried to "play" with a cormorant he found asleep on a river's beach. The bird tried to get away by sprinting (more like flopping, but anyway...) for the river. Cosinus, being a labrador, didn't even slow down getting in the water. The bird turned around to asses the situation only to be confronted by a big wet schnoz literaly in it's tailfeathers. It dove, came back, dog still there. Rinse, lather, repeat, 2-3 times until it got fed up. Our dog now sports a nice scar on its nose and the bird was able to make a properly dignified escape.
Posted by: Philippe | May 15, 2008 1:30 PM
Hank Fox @ 62, your story really pisses me off. I had a pet rat who had a stroke, and years later I still remember how nice everyone was at the vet's office, even the people in the waiting room that had "real" animals like cats and dogs. Even though it just was a rodent in a shoebox, it was still my pet and I was sad that it had to suffer and die, and it meant a lot that people were sympathetic.
Re. cats, keeping them indoors doesn't necessarily stem the blood tide. There's an apocalypse in my basement, all kinds of vermin, and my two cats consider it their own hellish toybox.
They open the door (I have no idea how they do that), find the very best snake, bring the snake upstairs to the living room, smack it around until they get bored, kill it without eating a single bite, and leave it on Daddy's chair so that when he comes home from work, he can see what they did all day. Thanks, thoughtful kitties!
My husband hates snakes more than Indiana Jones does, so I'm always on call for snake cleanup duties. Fortunately, snakes don't seem to be very juicy.
Posted by: clarence | May 15, 2008 1:42 PM
Here in Toronto, the local humane society will not let you have a cat if you plan to let it outdoors.
I watched a documentary (The Secret Life of Cats?) that stated that the domestic cat was the most prolific hunter on the planet. Why? They hunt for fun, not food! Also interesting, cats saliva is poisonous to small animals. One bite...slow agonizing death for poor little critter/varmint. The documentary featured a vet who specialized in treating victims of cat bites (varmints, not people!).
I believe the saying goes, "Tigers are the largest cats, but cats are the littlest tigers."
Posted by: MacDhai | May 15, 2008 1:45 PM
Keep your damn cats indoors. Most wildlife is suffering enough from habitat loss, pollution and climate change, the last thing they need is your vanity pets killing them for enjoyment.
Posted by: BG | May 15, 2008 1:45 PM
edit: They hunt, not only for food, but for fun.
Posted by: MacDhai | May 15, 2008 1:46 PM
(and/or congratulations on your escape, if applicable.)
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 15, 2008 1:47 PM
Well, it could be worse. It could be a horse's head.
Posted by: Alcari | May 15, 2008 1:49 PM
CA Supreme court just came out in favor of gay marriage! Wooo!
Posted by: Ugly In Pink | May 15, 2008 1:49 PM
...I'm sorry PZ. I found that funny. Very very very funny.
I'm sorry, cute bunnies! I'm sorry!!!
Posted by: Michelle | May 15, 2008 1:53 PM
Snowball.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | May 15, 2008 1:55 PM
#40, I'm with you on the slugs! My mostly-indoor cat likes to hang out on the patio, just watching the birds and fantasizing. He doesn't even try to catch anything, but he does have very long fur. Whenever he comes back inside in the evening, I have to do a tummy inspection. Half the time he's picked up slugs in his fur and doesn't even notice. After finding slugs in various places in the house, I finally caught on!
Posted by: Ann | May 15, 2008 1:56 PM
OK... cats chasing turkeys.
1. Background. I used to live just outside of Pittsburgh with a house where the backyard went about 20' and then down a *steep* slope into a fairly deep gully. By the early 2000s the gully was home to a flock of turkeys in addition to the other resident wildlife (deer, raccoons, fox, snakes, plus a myriad of rodents and other birds.)
The turkey flock (or part of it) would often go through yards in the early evening. Watched a dozen go up my driveway once, and have pictures of one scratching under my bird feeder as well.
One day I went to let the two cats out the front door. Apparently two turkeys were in the front yard at the time. As I openned the front door they started walking out of the yard headed uphill.
The cats went out the doors, saw BIRDS, and basically started running across the yard at the turkeys. The turkeys started walking a bit faster as they cleared the yard into the street, but otherwise did not act alarmed.
The cats got to the edge of the yard and checked up at that point. Not sure if it was the street, or that they realize that these were BIG birds and not going to be an easy job to tackle.
So they didn't quite make it to turkey-bird contact. Closest to that I've seen was another cat in the neighborhood down in the gully go through said flock while running away from me.
I'd turned up looking for one of my cats after hearing a cat fight start up. (I have half-Siamese cats, so they're easy to identify.) Went into the gully and found my cat cornered into a culvert by the other cat. Cats took off in different directions the moment I turned up.
Suddenly I heard a "burble burble" downslope and saw a turkey hop/fly about 8' up into a tree. Repeated 5-6 more times as the cat went through there and the turkeys in turn got out of the way.
- Kurt
Posted by: Kurt | May 15, 2008 2:03 PM
Off Topic, but California overturns gay marriage ban!!!
I'm just waiting for the Kool Kultural Konservative's heads to explode.
Posted by: Moses | May 15, 2008 2:05 PM
Don't automatically blame the cats. Dogs do this too. There was an incident outside of town where a couple dogs slipped out of their yard and went roaming. Roamed into a neighbor's yard where he had a rabbit hutch. They tore it open and scattered bunny bits all over. They didn't eat any part of the rabbits, just tore them to pieces and had a jolly old time doing, right up until animal control came along and hauled them off. I think the dogs in question were either goldens or labs.
Not saying that cats aren't death on small animals, but fido can be just as guilty.
Posted by: AarowSwift | May 15, 2008 2:07 PM
Can I borrow your cats? Damn rabbits killed off off my raspberries. Living in town, more direct forms of population control are frowned upon by the local constabulary.
Posted by: justawriter | May 15, 2008 2:12 PM
Ah yes, feline Love Offerings. Recognize them for what they are, and it makes the clean-up a little less bitter.
Back in my teen years, our family had a cat who was an amazing hunter, despite being only slightly sharper than a sack of hammers.
I remember one time she left us an Offering of a fully grown hummingbird. We were, all at once, tremendously pissed, and extremely impressed.
Posted by: Raynfala | May 15, 2008 2:15 PM
Kurt, thanks.
I'd love to be able to hear/understand/see the cats' thought process as they realize that the birds are bigger then them!
:-)
Posted by: Philippe | May 15, 2008 2:17 PM
I think the saying is, "Cats hunt more than they catch, catch more than they kill, kill more than they eat."
My in laws had a cat that would sit in their back yard and wait for a bird to fly overhead. In a split second, it would leap four or five feet into the air, snatch the bird out of the air, and that would be that. Later in the day, an offering of a beak and feet would be left on the back porch.
Said hunter also caught a few bunnies in his time, sometimes bringing them into their house (waiting for an open door and rushing past the slow humans), not quite dead.
I could care less than the rabbits, they breed like ... oh wait, I can't remember the rest of that one, but the birds typically only have one or two sets of chicks a year.
He eventually became an indoors only cat as his FLV progressed, and was only interested in sitting on laps and getting a scratch behind the ears.
Keep 'em indoors, for the birds and for their own health, and if you are adopted by a feral or stray, get them fixed.
Posted by: Robster, FCD | May 15, 2008 2:20 PM
I do have to wonder why, though, whenever there's a scattering of corpses around the house, my family looks to me and expects me to do the clean up.
Because equality is a canard. Women want equality, but they still want chivalry, someone to pick up the tab, someone to take out the garbage, someone to mow the lawn, and someone to pick up the rabbit guts. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
No, I'm not bitter. :)
Posted by: M07 | May 15, 2008 2:21 PM
Tut, tut. What are a few birds and squirrels, when cats make interstellar space travel possible?
Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2008 2:27 PM
All the anti-religion comments. Some people really have an ax to grind, eh? No doubt a purely science blog entry (with no mention of religion at all) would net more of the same ... alas, those types of posts are few and far between around here any longer.
Posted by: TomJoe | May 15, 2008 2:29 PM
I agree with the above commentators; allowing one's pet to massacre the local wildlife isn't cool or funny.
Posted by: Slacks | May 15, 2008 2:32 PM
What are you talking about, TomJoe?
Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2008 2:37 PM
Yes, but presumably your cats won't harm the environment indoors.
The problem is not that rabbits and mice are killed outdoors by cats. Generally rabbits and house mice end up being killed by something, even if it's cars or poison (you know, Malthus, Darwin, that whole bit), and most areas have at least enough of those animals, if not more than enough (which would not be true of every mouse and rabbit species). It's that birds (who also end up being killed--but we want them to reproduce for several years before they are killed) are decimated by cats. Not a problem when it's house sparrows and starlings, but a serious problem when it's bluebirds and tanagers.
PETA would probably be concerned by killings indoors and out. Environmentalists are worried about outdoor cats simply because they are efficient predators of diminishing populations of songbirds, along with some other animals.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Posted by: Glen Davidson | May 15, 2008 2:39 PM
"My condolences.
(and/or congratulations on your escape, if applicable.)"
Why, thank you, Sven. At the time, I loved it. My sister and I had gopher and king snakes as pets, went on long rambles in the hills behind our house.
I have many fond memories of Redlands, but admit that 1)I was a kid, and 2)it's been 40+ years since I was near the place.
Posted by: wright | May 15, 2008 2:44 PM
Well, I was about to eat lunch...
Posted by: Jackal | May 15, 2008 2:44 PM
Were they Precambrian bunnies?
Posted by: DaveH |