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:-D :-D I love puffins, beautifull birds! I don't mind they use the phrase adopting, what does it mean by the way? Do you get a couple to live in your house? I'm all up for that! The cats will love it as well :-P mmmmmm mm puffin.....

I read a story about people who adopted a pig......... and ate it a few months later :-O

I love puffins too, but unfortunately they don't let you adopt them (in other words, the birds don't get to come and live with you...) You, just give a donation to the trust, who then spend it on stuff to benefit the birds. you get a card from the trust. I'm all for that, but its not adoption. I sponser a child in Honduras, but he doesn't live here with me, he lives with his parents in Honduras, and the money benefits him and his community. I get a card twice a year from him.

We adopted a reindeer once and got a stuffed representation (at a fraction of the true size, luckily) to have and to hold. The actual reindeer was neither named nor delivered - I'm probably glad about that, on reflection. The cats, on the other hand ... Pluto you are wickedly funny sometimes. I'm sort of OK with the term "adopt an XX" because I know that it is done to make people feel connected (I'm not in to marketing but I can understand how it works). I can also see why it might grate. I'm also OK with "sponsor an xx" because it is probably a better description of what you are doing but doesn't pull on the heartstrings, though. So, Peahen is obviously sitting on the fence on this one ...

I sponsored (adopted) a foster parents plan child in India for years, that wasn't real enough, if I only could have been satisfied with those pictures and child's drawings lol. So I adopted for real, I sometimes wonder what if.....

Pluto, puffin numbers are dropping because of rats eating the eggs and chicks. If you could teach your cat to be selective and go for the rats it could be very useful. :-)

lol, I am ashamed to tell you that I've eaten puffin ones three decades ago on the boat to Iceland. At the moment my cats are inside with a cage to go outside as I'm afraid they get run over. In the last place where I lived they were free outside and killed all sort of critters. To compensate for their blood bath I fed the bird in the winter :-) (around 100kg mixed grain in a winter!)

When we got a bird feeder the number of birds and mice the cat brought in increased....

Yes I started feeding the birds but have now stopped on the advice of the pest control man who we called after we found rat droppings in the loft. My son said he had a ghost above his room as he could hear footsteps on his ceiling. We spent weeks telling he there was no such thing and he was imaging it till I heard the rat myself.

We visited puffins on a rat free island off Mull where they nest and are thriving. It's very relaxing watching them and the tour boat calls it Puffin Therapy !!

..... And there are no cats there either !!

I don't suppose anyone will ever see this comment add the discussion is really over but there's more snow coming so let's see... This topic is addressed, albeit in a light-hearted way, in John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme on Radio 4. It's 2 mins into episode 6 of series 7. It expires on iPlayer on Sunday at 6am. Worth a giggle.