Originally Posted by Mxfrank

Nope. Separated at birth, a cat rarely becomes an effective hunter. It will almost certainly be aggressive, but that's different from hunting. A cat learns to hunt when its mother brings home half-dead prey and allows the kittens to play with it (they are really cruel, you'd probably want to stop it if you ever saw it.) The behavior is learned in the first couple of months of life. Your cat may have thought you were doing that with the deer, but I bet it never figured out how to draw a bow.



If you have a good mouser, he/she will try to teach you to hunt by dropping live mice at your feet every now and then, just as its mother did. If your story was that the cat caught a deer and deposited it half-dead at your feet, then I'd say instinctive.