cat prey will be stopped if the cat desides to not bring it home. currently that happens quiet frequently.

and yes snow/cold affects corpses as they won't spoil if cold so they might be accumulating

I was meaning, maybe the snow/winter was causing the red X forbid icon. That is what seems new. I found a pile of 3 rabbits around a hole which all seemed fresh but had the red X on them all.

If the cat decides to not bring it home I wouldn't expect to see the red X.

I have this almost all the time with rats now, indoors and out. I haven't seen it with rabbits, but maybe my cats are too busy with the rats. A few updates ago, it wasn't happening if I was out of stored meat, then kicked in when I had decent stock in the icehouse. I interpreted it as my Folk deciding that since they had plenty of better meat they weren't desperate enough to eat rat. :-) It would be nice if there were an option to feed to the pets, or dispose in a corpse pile without slaughtering for meat.

This might've been fixed in .536:

Fixed bug where due to a timing issue, sometimes a Tamed Cat would go hunting and leave the rat/bunny behind with an X on it. This was likely the cause of the dead rats in the house with a red X on them too.