Sunday, September 6, 2009

Of cats and their prey


The story of the newly-discovered giant rat (see post below) reminded me of a post on author Mike Z. Williamson's LiveJournal that I read recently. In honor of the discovery, and because I like to laugh a lot from time to time, I recommend it to you. Here's an extract:

Dickens, our 20 lb kitten, likes ground squirrels. He thinks they're wonderful little friends to cavort with, and he'd never hurt one. They do find it a mite confusing when they head for the field, though, and he fishes them back, ever so delicately without a scratch. Hey, he's a French breed (Chartreux). What do you expect?

This gets very confusing, because Cameo, our 6 lb cat hunts and kills things, including birds on the wing. There's this really big cat who's so nice and playful and rompy, and then there's this lithe little bitch cat that moves in like a feline terminator crossed with Agent Smith.

This morning, Cameo hunted us a 13-line ground squirrel, unharmed, and carried it into the house. I wasn't in time to get a photo. She was quite proud, and presented us with her contribution for the pantry.

I think she was working on breeding stock for the zombie apocalypse. Doesn't want the hawks to get the strategic advantage. Let me note again: the critter was unharmed.

It skittered under the dishwasher, and I figured I'd have to go digging for it later. Since I'd had four hours sleep, I wasn't going to mess with it then.

A while later, Rascal was on top of Gail's footlockers, staring intently at her end table, tale twitching. Somehow, the little thing had crawled out, around the kitchen, down the hall, into the bedroom and to the far corner of the house.

When Gail got home, I eventually got the end table wiggled out of the way, and this little furball zinged out like a pinball, under the bed, bounced off the wall and headed for the laundry basket/repair basket/box stack. Rascal did a mid air 180, landed right behind, and the squirrel shotgunned across the floor and onto the window ledge, only to figure out there was some invisible barricade there. Poor little creature had to be VERY confused. First a predator catches him and doesn't eat him, not even one leg (I mean, a nice squirrel like that, you don't eat it all at once), and now he's somewhere with these strange walls. Not like the walls of a house you can go around. You go around these walls, you wind up right back where you started. Go straight away from it, and you're right back where you started. And it's inside out.


The rest of the resulting chaos may be read at the link. Go read, and enjoy, and have a good laugh!

Peter

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