I dunno if this is humane but put the bird in the freezer? Hopefully it will get hypothermia and "finish the job." Somebody please tell me if that's OK. I don't know how to finish killing the bird either...

I have 10 mins before I have to go back to work.

Lunaticfringe: that sounds so much better than trying to snap its neck, but it was half alive 10 mins ago, and I am afraid it will freak out if I get too close.


AGGGHHHHH!!!!

I've always just wrung their necks when that happened. Too coarse?

Yeah, I am afraid I am a WIMP. I keep going back and forth, I feel shitty for not doing anything at all, but I am too scared to do anything.

My landlord is awesome. I called him and he said he'd come over and take care of it for me.

Thank you LunaticFringe and small_ruminant!

In the future, the freezer method isn't the way to go. It'll make the poor bird very, very cold. Not very, very dead.

My guess is that the quickest way to go would have been to give the bird back to the cat. I know that sounds cruel, but it's life. It's noble and valiant to try to keep our pets from killing birds. But once the job is half done, it's not very noble and valiant to halt the process.

The bird's end would have come much quicker at the cat's hands, because the cat wouldn't have had to Google "quickest and least squickly way to kill injured bird."

my cat caught a caught fish.

I thought that too Mudpuppie, but once my cat saw me see him with the bird, he dropped it on the spot, walked over to me and rubbed up against my legs, mewed at me "Look, mamma aren't you just so proud of my hunting skills and abilities? Are we going to fry or friccasse it, huh, huh?" and lost intetrest in it completely then went and layed down in a patch of sun and proceeded to bathe. The other cat just sat there looking at it.

Thanks for the answer about the freezer MP, I almost did that until I chickened even further out and called the landlord, who just happens to live right next door.

For future reference, animal control, at least in my city, will come & pick the bird up. I discovered this a couple summers ago when my cats brought in a dying baby bunny and it got under a bookshelf. It was awful & like you, I had no idea what to do. So after the trauma of extracting it from the bookcase (really bad for everyone involved) I put it in a shoebox with some soft grass and stuff and then the animal control people finally showed up & took it away. And I suppose they killed it humanely, because the terrible & ugly truth is that cat saliva kills small animals. They can't survive a cat bite.

Funny after thought: When it happened I thought of you, Mudpuppie. I thought, Ya' know, I bet Mudpuppie would know exactly what to do and I almost called your cell for 4H advice!!!

Ahh... Animal control. I will keep their number handy for the next time.

Oh god, please no. If everyone called me every time they thought I knew the answer to something -- because, let's face, I know everything -- my phone would never stop ringing. And I don't like it when my phone rings.

One of the big downsides of having cats for those of us with warm fuzzy feelings towards all things. If it's the touching of the bird you have trouble with you could try putting a spade on its neck (like you're digging through it) and just pushing down hard in one go. I don't know if breaking the neck/decapitation is the most humane way, but it always seemed the best option given the means at my disposal.

And don't get too angry with the cat, I've never seen a cat that liked to hunt be trained out of it, so it'll just make at least one of you miserable.

*starts calling mudpuppie every 15 minutes just to say HI!*

Quentin: OOoh, too much for me. I will call Animal Control next time. Not mad at the cat, it's just what they do. I am just sad for the bird.

my cat caught a caught fish.

That took me a second to parse, but then I giggled. My parents cat once proudly paraded through the living room showing the mouse he had just caught, which happened to also have a mousetrap attached.

This happened to my brother once. He scooped the bird into a plastic bag, placed it under one of the rear tires of his car, and backed over it. It seemed like a relatively quick and painless way to go, but I guess you'd have to ask the bird.

goml - is it a young cat? Hopefully in time it will learn to kill the birdies all the way BEFORE serving it for dinner to Alpha Mamma! At least, both our cats did.

No Muddgirl, he's about 13 now. Both of my cats just like the chase and catch. The best was the time Tigette brought the half dead bird in the house, and it regained consciousness and began flying around the house feathers flying everywhere and I had no vacuum cleaner at the time. The runner-up story is when I used to leave the bathroom window for them and in the middle of the night Tippy jumped up on the bed, and I just knew something was "off", I turned on the light and he had dropped a half dead mouse on the bed.

Geez, after 13 years of this kind of stuff, you'd think I could deal with it much better, but the gifts are always half dead, except the headless mice I find in the morning at the front door if I leave them out all night....

Funny story about cats catching things...my aunt and uncle have a beef cattle farm in Pennsylvania. We had a family reunion there once when I was a kid. My two older girl cousins and I were sleeping in a borrowed tiny trailer, and we'd leave the door open so various cats could come be with us. I woke up one morning to find not only a dead mouse, but also a dead rat in the bed with me (luckily the sleeping bunk was large, and they were some distance from my actual person, but nevertheless). A cat that had taked a liking to me had brought me "presents". I dutifully praised the cat, and tossed the rat outside. The mouse she took under the trailer to eat.