My cat Sultan used to bring home all manner of things, particularly rabbits. He did bring home one or two birds, but they never met with the same reception from us as the mice, rabbit or ferrets, so he stopped. Or maybe they were too fast for him, but certainly he didn’t bring back many birds. The rabbits were nearly always dead when he brought them back, or adults and totally uninjured as far as we could see, and they’d run off as soon as he stopped trying to get them up the steps. We’d never stop him with his prey, but if he was ‘playing’ with something live we’d all go away and leave him to deal with it, so he wasn’t distracted or thinking he was amusing an audience. If he left anything suffering, my poor dad would take the high-powered air rifle and put it out its misery. We’re not hunters or anything, but a cat is a natural hunter and it always seemed unfair to us to intervene. Also, I’ve heard that as cats have such dirty mouths, bites on prey are quite likely to become infected even if you do save the poor thing.
I did try once, when I was a child, to save a mouse from him, and then had to watch it die from shock and injuries. So I learnt to leave Sultie to it sadly. Depends on how fast you can get to the prey animal I suppose and how you personally feel about it, I became proud of my little panther. Now he’s arthritic and has renal failure, so those days seem to be passed. Sigh!