Don't read this if you're squeamish

I may have made a casual, off-the-cuff remark the other day about my lack of respect for my cat's hunting abilities, prompted by her obsession with bringing earthworms into the house. It's worth complaining about. They shrivel up and stick to the carpet, and scraping them off is a disturbing and undesirable tactile sensation. Still, I should really know better than to tempt the fates by objecting to such a trivial inconvenience. In what seems to me to be a gross fate-based overreaction, I came home tonight to a hall full of feathers, a sitting room full of feathers, and a dining room full of very large, very dead pigeon. Now, my cat is not large. In fact she's not much more than a kitten; her recent foray into motherhood being but a chavvy teenage mistake which could have been easily prevented with better sex education in schools. So I was, and don't tell her I said so, ever so slightly impressed by her acheivement....

Breaking news! While I was typing that she brought in what appeared, at first (and very alarming) glance, to be a large turd. Luckily it turned out to be a half-eaten sausage. What is wrong with this animal?

....Anyway, back to the pigeon. It was surrounded by kernels of corn. Or wheat. Possibly barley. I'm not an expert on arable farming. Some sort of grain. They probably spilled from the bird's stomach when she ate it (sorry squeamish people, sorry, I did warn you) but it gave the odd impression of her having laid a little trail of them to coax it into the house. Maybe she did. Maybe she's out there right now with a little bag of cheese pieces, luring unsuspecting mice to a violent death. Run away, little critters! Run for your lives!