I usually think of those times as probably the highlights of my cat's day. She got to do something unusual, and will now get to dream of the one that got away for as long as her little brain holds onto it.

It is wholesome and right as rain for a somewhat predatory animal such as a cat to eat a non-pet animal such as a katydid. The cat should be able to find its own prey, but if you help, you should not interfere with the coup de grâce. You done wrong (although not terribly so), and you owe the cat an apology.

I apologized profusely, but she's dumb and she didn't understand. Now I'm trying to catch her a moth, but I fear this will somehow interrupt the whole Karmic cycle that I didn't intend to initiate in the first place.

Fuck it. I'm screwed.

If puppie hadn't come along,
Kitty would've done no wrong.
But puppie did,
And kitty didn't,
So katy didn't ...
(die, that is.)

I think you might be wrong. What caused the cat distress? The freeing? Or the capture, "rendition", and release?

Though perhaps you are asking, given that you have already given the bug to the cat, would it then be wrong to rescue it?

What a lot of questions you raise. Can a bug really suffer? Can a cat? Is the cat really distressed (as occhiblu mentions)? Is it wrong to make these kinds of decisions based on feelings of guilt? Can we really measure the suffering of animals in this way? Can any suffering be weighed up in such a utilitarian fashion? Are moral decisions based on intuition better or worse than those based on rational thought? Does it matter that the bug was suffering for the cat's entertainment rather than for food?

We need an ethicist, stat.

Or bunny gifs.

Catnip might also solve the problem. But my cat has an extraordinarily short attention span, so YMMV.

Woah

What if that katydid was an evil slumlord in an earlier life and deserved to die by tooth and claw? OMG, you just freed an evil slumlord, mudpuppie; do you believe sacrificing the personal injury attorney moth is going to save you?! I think not.

From a deconstructionist point of view, Katydid can be shortened to Katy, implying the K-T (Kansas to Texas) Railway, and it would seem that by allowing the Katydid to escape, indeed facilitating its escape, in can be inferred that yo are trying to escape from something or conversely entrap something (someone?) and lashed out at the cat as a convenient scapecat.

My dimestore pscyoanalysis is complete.

I'm not a vet or a licensed feline/bug-separation-therapy-specialist, but I think you're going to have to take the cat to Tibet to purr a few mantras and play with the fuzzy ball of virtue. Although you might be able to squeak by with a treat and an excessive head scratching.

Taz is right, evil slumlords are far worse than personal injury attorneys. Perhaps you can find a potato bug which was surely once something truly terrible.

Just kidding! Potato bugs are okay.