My front lawn is strewn with little grey feathers and riddled with partially-eaten bird and rodent corpses. Åsa is a huntress extraordinaire, which causes me no end of distress. It’s bad enough that she has to kill all those unsuspecting little creatures — the least she could do is dispose of their remains somewhere I’m not likely to walk barefooted.

I read a couple of weeks ago an account of how someone I know online taught his cat to stop killing birds. Whenever the cat came home proffering a new kill, the man would seize the booty immediately and give the cat some appropriate food in its place. In addition, he would make a production of eating a snack himself in front of the cat, so as to demonstrate to the cat that they had plenty to eat without preying on songbirds. Apparently the cat got the message and now co-exists peacefully with his fine, feathered friends.

Such an approach would never work with Åsa because she’s not a team player. She has never once left one of her kills as an offering to us, who provide her warmth, shelter, and all the Friskies Vitality Plus her little heart desires. When it comes to food, she’s looking out for Number One and what Number One’s little heart desires is fresh meat, and lots of it.

This whole bird-killing business is just one more reason I’m thinking that Moa and Prins Bertil will remain indoor cats. I don’t need three feline marauders on the loose out there. Even when she was an inside cat, however, Åsa was a well-tuned killing machine. No moth or spider or housefly was safe from her, and once she caught a bird on a balcony that was surely no bigger than three feet by eight feet. Waking up at five o’clock in the morning to the sound of madly-flapping wings and wild chirping inside my bedroom was one of the more unsettling experiences I’ve had. That bird fared better than her later catches, thankfully, and turned out to be only a bit stunned. When Olof returned it carefully to the balcony and released it, it flew off with understandable haste. Would that they all were so lucky.