So Long Squeaky.

[swestrup]

As I slept in so much due to this damned cold, I'm still not asleep yet. I just went downstairs a few minutes ago to get a snack and some more green tea, when I saw shreddy our tom cat pacing frantically around our roll-away dishwasher.

Now a house with two cats is not supposed to have mice, but I had wondered for some time if we might have actually have some in our kitchen as shreddy has recently taken to sleeping in there and I've often seen him sitting and just staring at the stove. Curious to see if there really was a mouse or if the cat had just batted a toy under it, I moved the dishwasher a few feet to the side.

I half expected to see a mouse make a sudden break for the hallway or stove area, but was rather surprised to see a small grey mouse just sitting there on the floor. A moment later the cat saw it too, and it was suddenly cat food. Well, more like a cat toy. I think Shreddy would love to have some kind of pet that he could keep in a box and let out whenever he wanted something to chase.

Years ago when he somehow caught a bird in the house he kept trying to find a box he could put it in and close the flaps so it wouldn't escape. All the time he was making a funny mewing noise around the bird. He behaved the exact same way with this mouse but I could tell it was already dead and would not be a pet for Shreddy. By the time I got my snack and headed upstairs, he had dropped it on the floor and was batting it to see if it would go.

I must admit I'm of two minds about how to think about all this. On the one hand it was a cute mouse but on the other hand I don't want a mouse colony living in my kitchen either.

Comments

[ai731.livejournal.com]

When Saash started hunting (which was right after she recovered from her pre-adoption trauma, learned that she was in a safe place, and learned that there were moving things to catch and eat outside) I decided that I was never going to scold her for bringing kills (or not-quite-yet kills) into the house. She was only doing what her instincts told her to; and no matter how cute the occasional fieldmouse was, she was doing a community service every time she brought down a full-sized rat. Plus she ate most of what she caught. Also the vet assured me that a combination of dry food and live prey was the healthiest possible diet for a domestic cat. I felt so bad about her not being able to hunt when we moved to Montreal (due to lack of prey in the garden) that I've occasioanlly considered buying a couple of feeder mice for her, but I can't quite square that with my conscience.