We have had cats for the last 22 years, and have outlived two already. We have had Blackie since 2004. He is a tuxedo cat that my daughter found as an abandoned kitten in the parking lot of the Rave movie theater on W Street. He is a wild and free spirit that other families would not have tolerated (like a habit of biting people who are not careful with him)--but his zany attitude also makes us love him so much.
Blackie is restricted to the back yard by a Purrfect Fence that we installed in 2008. We had to do this because we have a nearby neighbor who traps cats that stray into his yard and turns them over to animal control. Most of the other cats in the neighborhood are smart enough to stay out of Ed's traps; but after Blackie got trapped the second time in 2-years, we had to do something, so the fence went up. But, he can come and go between the house and the yard as he pleases via a pet door.
This morning, my wife was fixing her breakfast in the kitchen when there was suddenly a very loud blood-curdling scream. She thought she had accidentally stepped on his tale while cooking. She looked down, and the scream came from the young mockingbird he was holding in his jaws, that he had just brought into the house. My daughter managed to separate the cat from the bird and take the bird outside. It was injured, but still alive. She was going to take it to the wild life sanctuary, but it got away from her when she got outside. It will likely end up a meal for other neighborhood cats.
Blackie has never been much of a hunter. He is more like Sylvester from the cartoons (who was also a tuxedo cat). But when he catches something, he brings it into the house, dead, or alive. Sometimes we end up with lizards running around our house from him bringing them inside through the pet door and then releasing them. Luckily, the few times he has brought in a snake, they were already dead. The time he brought in a rat, it was dead-luckily.