I know it might sound silly because cats are natural hunters. Before, my cats would just hunt and play with mice. I would find the bodies on our doorstep or somewhere else. *shivers*
However, lately, my dad told me that my cat Pochi has been killing birds. This week alone, she has killed three. What's worse is that the birds she killed are very rare in our area. They are not just sparrow. They are blue with grey and very beautiful.
I don't know how to stop my cat from killing the birds. When I try to stop her, she just runs away with her kill.
I don't know if it's actually feasible. As you said cats are natural hunters, and it's natural for them to stalk prey like birds. Furthermore cats are pretty hard to train.
Even if you were to miraculously train them not to hunt, there's no way you could train them to selectively not hunt only birds.
The solutions are two in my opinion.
1) keep your cat indoors. I wouldn't suggest it for outdoor cats, they have a right to live in the environment they are used to. But it's a solution, albeit drastic. It will also keep them safe from other dangers.
2) tie a little bell around their necks. The bell will be noisy when they move, making it much harder for them to stalk a prey. Still, any prey, not only birds.
Your cat must be an amazing hunter if she can catch birds that easily ! Birds are pretty hard to sneak up on, unless there is a bird feeder where they are coming and eating and the cat sees them and catches the birds while they are eating.
I think the cat bell would probably stop her from catching the birds; but as was mentioned, it would stop her from catching mice or any other prey as well.
I don't know if it would work, but they make little glue-on toenail covers to keep cats from scratching up furniture, and maybe a set of those would also stop her from grabbing the birds.
Except for keeping her in the house during the day when the birds are out flying around, it is going to be pretty hard to stop her from trying to catch them. But if you keep her in during the day and let her out overnight, she can still catch mice and other night creatures, and the birds will all be high up in the trees sleeping and safe by then.
If your cat is going to be outdoors, which is clearly the case, since the subject is catching birds, I wouldn't recommend the claw covers. Any cat outdoors may encounter a situation where the claws might be necessary.
Bells on the collar might help but cats are amazing adapters. I'll be you'll find that your little darling will learn to stalk without ringing the bell.
In time, your cat will probably grow out of it. I took in a feral cat years ago, and just lost her, probably to a fox, less than a year ago. I won't go into detail about her because I've done that elsewhere in this forum, but on-topic in this thread is how she got her name -- Bird.
She was a tiny little kitty, and the most agile cat I've ever had. She could cross from one tree to another by walking to the end of a branch as it bent over, crossing onto the branches of another tree.
Before I took her in, she was sitting on my lap outside our ambulance station, as I was talking to our landlord, the man we rented the station building from, who lived next door. This was in South Texas, near Mexico, and he had several hummingbird feeders up in a large tree. He had it set up so that he could lower them with pulleys to refill them, etc.
At the time that we were talking, there were six different varieties of hummingbirds in his feeders, he said. I had to accept his word for it because they were tiny birds high in a tree, and I could barely see them, let alone determine subspecies.
Bird seemed to be paying no attention whatsoever. In time, our neighbor went back inside his house and I went into the station. Not long after, I came out to find this kitty bouncing something around in the driveway.
It was a hummingbird. She had gone up and got herself one. She also got a name.
Even after I took her into the house, she was an avid hunter, killing and eating all manner of birds and rodents. But after a few years, she began bringing them in alive and unharmed. She would come in the cat door, meowing loudly so that the other cats could see what she had brought them, drop whatever it was on the floor, and prance proudly off, as if her job was done.
I would then rescue the creature and bring it back outside, but I tried to do that when Bird wasn't watching so as not to hurt her feelings.
Over the years, she had brought in countless birds and rodents, a snake, a baby snapping turtle, frogs, and even a live bat (neither she or the bat were harmed). She would also leave gifts outside our bedroom door, which included dirt clods, empty cigarette wrappers that she must have dug out of someone's trash, leaves, branches, etc.
Her goal was to bring the outside inside, apparently.
