We have hunting cats here - they walk in and stay a while. We have
3 buildings and one is prime for mice - being old wood.

Cats hunt lots of good stuff. They even hunt snakes. I haven't seen
a garden snake all summer. Suspect the heat ran them to the creek.
But then maybe some got eaten.

I know our king snake is healthy. He likes copperheads.

Martin


On 9/17/2012 6:33 PM, George Plimpton wrote:
On 9/17/2012 4:24 PM, Bob Engelhardt wrote:
Doug Miller wrote:
Hungry ones. Give the cat just enough cat kibble so that it knows it
has a steady supply of food, but not so much that it's too sated to
hunt.
...

Not true (well, at least not in my experience). We had a great hunter*
who always had a bowl of food to eat at his pleasure. My take was that
he hunted for the pleasure of it. I.e., because it was in his nature to
do so. Neighbors with cats say the same.

We did have a cat that was a terrible hunter. She was a pure bred,
whose ancestors had not been outside for generations! Confirming what
I've heard that cats are taught to hunt by their mothers.

So, I'd recommend getting a kitten (or 2) whose mother was a hunter.

Bob

* - he caught and ate gray squirrels!

I forget where I read that cats are taught to hunt by their mothers, but
I'm pretty sure it's true. Kittens that are taken at very young age
rarely make effective hunters.

The best hunting cat I ever had was a large neutered male. One summer
he must have killed and left 20 or more varmints in the back yard:
pocket birds, gophers, mice, rats, moles, a squirrel. Twice he caught
hummingbirds, one of them two at once. He seemed to lose interest when
he got older, but one time at about age 13 he caught a big rat in the
house and just thrashed it to death.