I’m at a friend’s place and the cat keeps bringing in dead (or half-dead) animals into the house. It’s my understanding that cats think we are big, helpless kittens that don’t know how to hunt. Hence, they think they are doing us a favour.
It seems like a few mice actually escaped and found refuge in some walls in the house, so these “presents” are actually more than just annoying (and smelly if the dead animal ends up behind the couch).


What specific wild cat are you talking about in Europe? Do you mean feral domesticated cats (which are essentially this one small African cat)? Or larger critters like bobcats?
The European wildcat - Felis silvestris.
Interestingly it seems that they avoided interbreeding with domestic cats for over 2k years.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-11-06-european-wildcats-avoided-introduced-domestic-cats-2000-years