Was it the little yellow cat that was taken? Personally, I think it will end up like the third cat, which will be beaten up. Because the author's purpose is just to punish the cat who ate the bird. It won't stop beating the second cat just because it's active and loves to play. At most, the beating would be lighter. The author wrote this last cat just to feel remorse for his wrongdoing. It would have ended the same way for the second cat. Of course, if the cat hadn't died, the author wouldn't have blamed himself too much. It wouldn't have caused so much reflection. It can be seen that the author's focus in writing this article is on blaming his own behavior. Rather than feeling sorry for the cat's lost life. (I've never been a big fan of putting a lot of emotion into a piece of writing, because the author probably didn't think about it that way and was simply writing about it. But nowadays the teaching has to add different meanings to this article, it can't be helped, such as revealing the darkness of the society at that time and so on, showing the author's indignation towards the phenomenon of xx, ah. (I think all these are added subjectively by later people, the intention of the article is not to express this.)

I'm already an out-of-school person, so answering questions in school with my current conception of how to do questions may be biased. You should consider what the questioner wants the answer to be. Because that's how literature was before college, it's not about what you should fill in, it's about what the questioner wants you to fill in. I don't know if what was said speaks to you.