Rascal

Our cat (who left home to live with us..lol) is too lazy to catch anything!
Why bother when there is fresh food every day in her dish? lol
Na, she has had a bird and a mouse (still alive) but then she let it go and couldn't be ar8:ed to go after it a second time..lol

eddie007

Our boys arrived from the uk in september... Maslow doesnt go out at all... His choice, charlie does as he pleases during the day but is confined to barracks at night... We have two lodgers... Tabbyfur who is currently curled up on my bed sleeps in at night and oscar.. Well oscar went walk about and has gone back to his old house... ther's a rescue mission on for tonight... And then HE will become a strictly indoor cat again.... They are all over fed pampered pussies but they still like mousing .... No "natives" murdered to date... But thats probably more luck than design.... that and we live in town ....

Wishwewerethere

Thought I would post sites on here who we found that specialise in modular cat cages and runs, although in the end we had a mates friend who builds bird cages build one for us that attaches to the ensuite window leading to a larger cage down the side of the house,via a catflap in the flyscreen and the cats love going out there now so they get confined to the bedroom and ensuite areas during the day and only roam the house at night when the kids have gone to bed and there is no danger of someone accidently letting them out, anyway hope these are of use to someone.
http://www.catnip.com.au/
http://www.bettapetsystems.com.au/
http://www.catmax.com.au/
http://www.catnets.com.au/

Dorothy

Go **** yourself troll. I've already stated I have a stalker so the position is filled.

JustBecause

We have a system for our cats where there is a wire around the property which responds to receivers on their collars so when they get near the wire the receiver beeps with increasing frequency & loudness until if they get close enough it delivers a tiny electric shock. I know it sounds barbaric but honestly the shock is just like a static one, & you can vary all the settings on it, & you train them first to respond to the beeps before the shock (as far as you can train cats). It was originally developped only for dogs. There are fancier versions where you can have the wire actually embedded in the ground around your property but obviously that is more invasive & pricey.

We use this in conjunction with a Locator which is another thing they wear on their collar (so they do look a bit done up like xmas trees!) & it lets us know if they wander more than a certain distance in case they have managed to get out of their boundaries. This happened once & we found the cat very worried stranded on a rock in the bush about 5m away! This can also be used to track their whereabouts & is the same thing people use for tracking down keys & even children I believe. Again there are fancier ones which operate on a subscription basis & use sat nav to locate animals.

We decided to use this cos we couldn't bear to keep the cats inside & the runs seemed like such a poor substitute unless you can get a really big one or the cats don't know any better. We back onto bush so we wanted to try to prevent losing them after we paid for them to come over here with us!

They are half-siamese, white fur & useless at catching anything. The only thing they do is remove the smaller lizards' tails which doesn't seem to kill the lizads or occasionally catch a big moth. Compare this to our pool which most weeks we had to fish at least one drowned kookaburra out of & countless snakes, frogs & lizards before we got a cover. I do find it a bit strange that Aussies go on about the native wildlife thing when in suburbia the trend is now for smaller & smaller backyards, plus they do away with trees so they can have an easily mowable plot or cover the area with patio tiles,decking & pools thus removing the habitat available for wildlife in the first place.

Bix

Excellent post JB.
Very informative.

Bix

Would this be the wrong moment to request a photo for my garden Dorothy?

Petals

Oh what a good idea I need this for my cats, I have three now and because we live on a large block with farm fencing its easy for them to slip away. The dogs on the property next door actually killed one of my cats. We had dogs too so the cats were not frightened of dogs. We no longer have any dogs they retired, got very old and headed off to dog heaven. So now we just have the cats.

Where abouts did you get the system from an electronics shop ?

man_called_Horse

There is a lot of remarks about cats biting tails off lizards, in actual fact the little skinks can shed their tails at will as part of sort defensive mechanism. (confuses predators and gives the lizard more speed)

They can regenerate their tails again.

Cheetah7

Yep, we had a gheko live in our house for a couple of weeks, we could not catch him try as we might and one day I found his tail wriggling by itself by the door and the lizard was somewhere else minus his tail. We caught him eventually.

Freaky when you see the tails moving on their own.

Indented Head

I love a woman with attitude. I really like you Dorothy

Dorothy

I don't like you, so piss off.

Indented Head

I like you lots

sammyg

Our feral little aussie meow meow has given us gifts of;

many screwed up huntsmen and other spiders

A waterdragon (that he got in big trouble for as he came slinking down the path with it hanging out of his mouth - almost the same size as him!) Luckily it was still alaive as they pretend they're dead.

A snake!!

He did catch a small maggy once (they do tease him though and Plovers actually gang up on him and peck at him -evil birds)

Our strange moggy also seems to think that the pool is his water bowl. He never drinks from his water bowl

tonyk38

Has anyone had their cats eaten by pythons? A work colleague of mine had two taken this way and had to rescue the third one from the jaws of another!