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My cat ate a squirrel's entire head...

#41
I hope you dont have coyotes nearby. Our momma cat was smart and didnt stray outside the yard at night.

We got a new feral cat. She dissappeared after i opened up the cage door. But there was a full size field rat kill in the road to the house the next morning.

I wish she would quit pooping on the porch.
 
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#43
jugglingfreak said:
I'm a little late to the party. I'm not sure how common it is, but I had a cat that did the same thing. Well, maybe, I never actually witnessed it. She would bring us little "gifts" all the time. Squirrels, moles, rabbits, birds, etc (Including a $1800 Macaw. Long story.)

But every one of them had the heads ripped off. I never really thought about what she did with the heads of the animals, but, sounds like what your cat is doing.
Click to expand...
Macaw story please!
 
#44
two fingers said:
Oh I didn't need a "solution" to what isn't a "problem". :D

I was just wondering if this is a common thing.

His "castle" is our almost 5 acre yard and surrounding areas. But we take good care of him. He lives the good life. ;)
Click to expand...
When I lived in Virginia I had a cat that liked squirrels. He ate it all but the tail; too fuzzy maybe?
 
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#48
Downunderwonder said:
Macaw story please!
Click to expand...

Ok. The neighborhood I lived in at that time had a weird setup. The street I lived on was just a row of houses like most suburban areas.

They people behind us had a large house, a pool and owned the land all the way down the street.

neighbor.png


Yellow squares are the properties on my side, red square is my house. The blue rectangle is the other neighbor's property.

In the pool area. They had a stand for their macaw. They normally kept him inside, but in the summer, since it's wings were clipped, they let him sit on the outside perch, poolside. Beautiful, huge, red macaw.

Go to go outside one Saturday morning, and laying at the doorstep, laid in a row like the cat usually displayed her "gifts for us" was 2 squirrels, a blue jay, and a large red macaw. All headless. I called my mom, who told me to shove it in a trash bag and take it somewhere and bury it or dispose of it before the neighbors saw it.

Then, as only my mother would, she started yelling at the cat for going after a bird whose wings were clipped, because it didn't have a fair chance..
 
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#56
fcleff said:
This thread is awesome. I will try to not spoil the awesomeness with my nerdy techno speak.
Cats are dedicated carnivores (obvs). So when they eat in the wild they will typically go for the most nutrient dense parts first. Brains, eyeballs, tongue, and the attendant glands in the head are VERY nutrient dense. Squirrel bones are also soft and easily chewed and digested. So there is rich calcium content in that skull, too. So the fact that your cat went straight for the head of a small rodent is no surprise. To your cat, that’s some good eating.
Had your cat been truly feral it would have saved the lower parts for later. But as a domestic it was expecting you to eat them.
Larger cats will go for the innards (liver, heart, kidneys, stomach contents) of larger prey first and then work on the head and muscular content (scraping hard bones for calcium).
One of my cats has severe food allergies and requires a raw food diet. So I switched them all to raw food. The results in health have been nothing short of amazing. But raw food is expensive when bought from the store. So I started making it myself. My research led me to all these little factoids.
Now once every six weeks or so I grind up 40 pounds of chicken meat, bones, liver, and eggs with added vitamins and minerals (B, E, Taurine, and iodized salt) and stock my freezer.
f
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That is 1 lb per day of meat.

6 cat?
 
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#59
IamGroot said:
I hope you dont have coyotes nearby. Our momma cat was smart and didnt stray outside the yard at night.

We got a new feral cat. She dissappeared after i opened up the cage door. But there was a full size field rat kill in the road to the house the next morning.

I wish she would quit pooping on the porch.
Click to expand...

Actually, we do have coyotes. We pretty much have everything you would expect in the suburban woods.... bears, raccoons, possums, coyotes, deer, snakes, rabbits, squirrels, tons of predatory birds, the largest wood peckers I have ever seen.... like two feet wing spans or more.... amd any other North American critters you can think of. Rattlers and gators have been spotted nearby as well.
 

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