You can’t stop a cat acting like a cat, Jams. The hunting instincts serve me well in rodent control, but I wish you could restrict their activities to other mammals, especially rodentia.

curmudgeon cat’s favorite prey has always been too big to drag home, but all of our family cats regularly shared their bounty with us humans, mostly lizards and birds and mice, but there was the occasional small snake.

Our cat down on the bayou didn’t share – she ate what she caught except for heads and tails. My brothers and I were the ones who would bring things that my Mother wasn’t fond of into the house.

Of course, being a kid, the next thing I did after washing clothes for a week was go out and buy a rubber snake and put it in the middle of the kitchen floor (the mudroom was on the carport side of the kitchen and had two doors, one to the back yard and one to the carport, as well as having the washer and dryer). Sure enough, there was a big shriek that evening and the three names thing and “get this snake out of my house!”. So I calmly ambled over to the “snake”, picked it up by its tail, opened up the back door, and tossed it out. Then I didn’t have to wash all the clothes anymore ;-). I still to this day have no idea what happened to the original (non-rubber) snake. When my mother moved out years later, there was no little skeleton of a snake under the washer or dryer. All I can figure is that at some point in time it came out from under the washer/dryer and the cat got it and took it back out again since obviously we weren’t welcoming its gift with the proper praise :-).

– Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Been there and done that with pygmy rattlesnakes, Badtux.