A friend of mine's cat always used to leave headless mouse and bird carcasses on his front doorstep. He was very suspicious of the cat. He firmly believed that the cat had a Satanic Altar somewhere out in the woods behind the house, built from all the skulls.

I told him he was probably wrong. A proper Satanic Altar needs drippy black candles. Cats can't light matches, no matter how hard they try, even those strike anywhere bluetip ones.

When I lived in the country I had an indoor/outdoor cat called Raphael. Being a black cat, he had something of the night about him and used to play Jack the Ripper with the local mouse population. Except instead of displaying the little mice prostitutes in the foggy streets of East London, he used to unzip their furry corpses on our kitchen floor. We never simply found a dead mouse. We found mice, sprawled on their backs, split from stem to stern with the internal organs loosened just enough to distinguish each from the other.

Sometimes, one or other of the cats would try the contents. But there was always a mysterious purple bit they left behind.

I swear he was trying to find what made them so exciting. Who knows, maybe he has progressed to reanimation by now.

Probably the liver, would be my guess. Liver is purplish and gross, and full of toxins, so animals (unlike people) have the good sense not to touch it.

And yet that cat loved a bit of liver when I served it up.

It's the old opposable thumb problem again, isn't it? He couldn't get to the fridge in order to soak it in milk and then fry it up with a bit of bacon and onion...

You know I only read it for the pict erm articles.