We have two cats but no catbox. We allow our cats full-time access to the outdoors via a cat-door from the kitchen to the cellar and another through the cellar wall to the storage area under the porch. We've never had so much as a turd in the house, and their shit-spot remains a mystery like the elephants' graveyard. It's out there somewhere on our 400 acres.

The down-side is that they bring all sorts of wildlife into the kitchen in various states of dismemberment. Sometimes their catch is alive and fully mobile, like the red squirrel that got away from them and hid in our Christmas tree, or the brown bat that flew into my wife's hair, or the woodcock that flew into my face. Once they brought a full-grown muskrat, minus the head, up the cellar steps but couldn't quite fit it through the upper cat-door. Stepping on that was quite startling, to say the least. Then there are the birds... .

Their kills have provided lessons in natural history for me and the boys, since many of them are in fresh and perfect condition, just dead. Have you ever stretched the rubbery membrane of a bat's wing, extended the soaring membrane of a flying squirrel or stroked the velvet fur of a star-nosed mole? Or held a pygmy shrew, smallest of the mammals?

Other animal-lovers tell us that we should keep our cats confined to avoid this carnage, but then we'd have a cat-box to empty, so this is an ongoing moral dilemma. We have cats to keep the rodents down, otherwise we'd be overrun. There's been a family of rats on this old farm since 1871, but the cats keep their numbers manageable. It would be fine if they'd confine their murderous mayhem to rats and mice, but they'll kill anything smaller than they are, and I hate it when they kill birds. Last summer I was admiring a male bobolink on the telephone wire, and twenty minutes later I found it dead on the ground by the barn.

I know all about Nature red in tooth and claw, but this portion of it is within my power, and I know that spoiled American house-cats kill billions of birds and other creatures a year, some of them threatened or endangered, that in fact cats are a major predator. What's worse, that predation is largely an instinctive game to them; they're well-fed and don't need to hunt in order to survive. They kill because that's what their genes tell them to do. So there we have the horns of that particular dilemma. Some days I feel like strangling our cats, particularly when I find a bird dismembered all over the kitchen, downy feathers drifting out from under my feet, but I keep feeding them.