"My Cats Are Safely Indoors"

Wellll...this turns out to be not quite accurate. Portia, our retarded orange tabby cat, shows no interest whatsoever in going outside. Open a door and she cowers. But Molly, the calico, will shoot out between your legs every chance she gets. She gets out, briefly, about once every six weeks.

There's nothing you can do, either, once she's out, but wait for her to come to the back steps and meow to be be let in again. That may take an hour or so; ten minutes in cold weather or rain.

And that's why she still needs rabies vaccinations and flea and tick and heartworm medicine (expensive stuff!), and that's how she got hurt recently and is lucky to be alive.

She is missing big patches of fur and has three wounds: two long gashes on her neck, one below and one on top, and a smaller elongated gash on the side of her neck. There are puncture wounds within those gashes, and they aren't teeth marks, either. They're talons. A raptor's talons really are sharp as razor blades.

A Great Horned Owl can carry about 1.75 pounds. A Red Tailed Hawk can carry 2.5 pounds. A Bald Eagle, which we also have here, can carry up to 12 pounds for a short distance. But these birds don't necessarily carry their prey away. If undisturbed, some of them actually prefer to eat their prey on the ground right where they kill it. That means the above weight limitations do not apply. A hungry hawk will try to kill anything it thinks it can.

That includes cats. And Chihuahuas and Yorkies and Toy Poodles and pretty much anything under 25 pounds.

Molly weighs 9 pounds. In some ways it's surprising she got away, although if you knew this cat, you'd pity any bird of prey that messed with her!

Still, guard your pets. If you can't keep them indoors, keep them in a covered pen. And if the cover is of wire, put a tarp over it, too. What the hawks can't see from aloft they won't come down to investigate more closely. Be sure the wire mesh is too small for a bird's claws to go through. I once watched a hawk grab one of my ducklings right through the wire of the pen! Of course he couldn't get the duckling out, but the duckling was still dead.

Let Molly's misfortune be a warning. She won't heed it, but I hope you will.