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Comment by xkcd-sucks | Hacker News Reader

Probably depends on the individual's tendencies. My cat's kill stats for year to date, not too many birds:

    Total          106
    --------------------
    Bird           3
    Red Squirrel   1
    Chipmunk       9
    Rabbit         11
    Vole           59
    Deer Mouse     23

My garden and house really appreciate the vole/mouse/chipmunk control

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How did you produce these numbers?

You sound way too confident in it's validity unless you've put a camera on the cat and check the full recording every day...

My educated guess would be that the gato presents them with these offerings.

So these numbers are lower bounds.

Lower bound but pretty confident in accuracy - Have eyes on all catflap traffic, some accelerometer/position data (a cat collar tracker, not a cat tracker!), and observation thus far supports the conclusion that he stages all kills in his "abattoir" area unfortunately underneath the couch regardless of their eventual disposition - pretty common behavior

The last rabbit we had at home ran around on its own.

I developed a friendship with our horse, but did not seem to be on friendly terms with the neighbors cat. One time I saw them running across the driveway: the cat first, panicking, the rabbit a meter or two behind chasing it.

At one point, we had a cat, a dog, and a rabbit. The rabbit and the dog bonded over eating the cat's food.

Our neighbors had bunnies escaping because they developed a friendship with wild hares. Seems similar when a dog develops a friendship with a coyote and start misbehaving going on the hunts with them.

My cat only very rarely manages to get chipmunks and mice, but he doesn't usually kill them, generally alternating between cuddles and grooming and beating them savagely to make them jump and run. He's scared of birds after being mobbed by robins and crows.

Is he interrupted in his cuddles and beatings? Cats are much like the kind of psychopaths you'll find in the intelligence services, as portrayed in movies. They'll torture their captive, play with them to train themselves (and possibly for fun, who knows?), and it seems your cat likes to play good cop too. At the end, if the captive's heart hasn't already given out, they'll kill it.

Goodness. How big are the rabbits in your area? The ones here are so large that I imagine that A) a cat could not catch them and B) the rabbit would disembowel the cat with its rear feet. I've seen rabbits do impressive things to small dogs and snakes. I wouldn't want one near my cats.

I have seen cats catch rabbits as big as themselves.

That’s impressive. On my mothers farm, the turkeys run the show followed by the geese. But neither one of them will ever bother the rabbits. It’s interesting watching the hierarchy.

She has numerous 150lb+ dogs and they all defer to the turkey and geese. Even the donkeys don’t go near the turkeys and geese The geese can’t really hurt you, but I’d rather fight a 150lb dog than a 60lb turkey.

My grandfather used to keep a couple of rabbits in the barn to run off the rats! He swore that rabbits naturally hated rats and would fuck them up if they could get near them.

Rabbits can be fierce. They aren’t as intimidating as wild turkeys or the boars around here, but I wouldn’t want to try to handle a wild rabbit.

Smaller cats will catch the baby rabbits, but a larger cat has no trouble catching and eating adult rabbits in my experience. The largest thing I've seen a cat catch was a grouse. Turkeys are too large. Weasel like things seem to be too fierce.

They don’t want to catch a turkey. We’ve had turkeys kill medium sized dogs and they’ve put holes in the side of the feed man’s truck with their claws.

Living on a farm, I've seen some fairly impressive semi feral tom cats. When they're young and they hunt a lot they develop muscle on every inch of their body, once had one who was quite tame, his back muscles felt like a bag of marbles, they were that well developed.

I'd have no doubt he could've taken a rabbit especially given the ambush nature of their hunting.

I watched a documentary many years ago on cats (in the UK). It featured a study looking to measure the number of animals killed by house cats (or just "cats" in British English, strays are incredibly rare, "house cats" are those that never leave the house). One house cat, in Devon if I remember correctly, had the most kills in the study - an order of magnitude above or something like that - and so the cameras paid his owner a visit.

They introduced the cat with a shot of him on what looked like a hill with a ledge and him looking over it, and a town out of focus below in the distance. One moment he was there, next moment he just dropped over the ledge, no jump, just dropped. Cut to the owner talking about his cat.

Next shot, the cat is back on the ledge holding a giant rabbit (or perhaps hare) in its jaws, that was comparable to the size of the cat, if not bigger. It was like watching a big cat kill. I'll never forget it, so striking.

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