Cats and Feeders?

Well....One day my cat got into my feeder room overnight and I did not know. He ate 32 ASFs by the time I realized he was missing....

Other than that, my snake room buddy gets a f/t rodent on most feeding days. He plays with the dead rodent for a while, eats it, then begs me for more. If he nabs a live one he's a really quick killer then plays with it. I really don't like wasting my live rodents on him though :cool:

My rat terrier is helpful at finding and flushing out any escapees from the rodent tank. Ranger likes to play with them and winds up traumatizing the rodent to death(no blood). The draw back is it can be difficult to get the rodent away from him so I've wound up with a couple dead feeders on occasion. He'll sit in front of a tank with rodents in it while whining and licking his lips.

Lol.

Rat terriers doing what rat terriers do best: ratting.

Love it.

I feed my bobcat hybrid a diet of mice and premium canned cat food. I wish I could get my other indoor kitties to eat mice, but I haven't been able to get them to accept it yet. It is the best diet you can give a cat; whole prey.

Like everyone else I agree that it depends on how fast and accurate she can kill. I know a lot of cats tend to play with their prey before killing it and you don't want the poor thing suffering for half an hour. Id try f/t first and see what her response is.

Oh, I feed f/t to my cat... I love my mice too much to feed live.

My cats (and dogs) are on a raw diet. When I started them on raw, they actually did eat whole (f/t) prey. They aren't on whole prey any more, but I have given them prekilled or f/t feeders if a snake refused. I would never give them a live mouse though, because they would not kill it quickly. They like the play more than the kill (it's not fun any more if it's dead!), and the animal would suffer. I'm not ok with watching an animal suffer like that. (Yes, it happens in the wild, I'm a biologist and actually have to see it with my own eyes. I'm not ok with allowing that to happen in my house where I have some control.)

I know this is an old thread but I wanted to add my two cents. I trained my youngest cat to hunt on live hoppers when I had a mouse colony for my snakes. He's not a fast killer, so I only did it a handful of times but it paid off. He's an excellent hunter now. I constructed a little arena of cardboard boxes, cut and tapped together to stand up, set Murry in there and the mouse after. A lot of people mentioned that whole prey items are the best thing to feed cats. The reason behind this is that cats have evolved to efficiently process meat, getting most of their moisture from their prey and various supplements from the prey's skeleton. Dry food diets try to replicate this by using a lot of vegetable based filler, vitamins and only a little meat product. Cats can't digest this nearly as well as whole prey. Point in case; I had a period of two months recently where I was buying very cheap food for my cats, with the result of my cats eating and eating but staying skinny. I was absolutely baffled until I researched cat diet and looked at the ingredient list on food bags. I switched brands and saw an immediate difference in their health. Once I start a mouse and rat colony again I plan on feeding the cats whole prey regularly.