While the ex-family were here a few weeks ago the cat brought in a mouse… alive of course. She proceeded to drop it to the floor and then batted it around a bit, but before I could stop her or catch the thing, the mouse made its escape by breaking the world record for the 20 centimetre dash. Quick as a flash it zoomed under the piano and made its way across the skirting boards under the shelving at the kitchen end of the room. To be charitable, the cat isn’t the brightest of beasts… as my brother was wont to say “The lights are on but nobody’s home”… so of course she couldn’t catch it. In fact she spent the longest while squatting in entirely the wrong place expecting no doubt, that the mouse would leap out from hiding straight into the gentle caress of her jaws. And so, the mouse stayed in the house.
Oddly enough, the visitors told us that a few days later they actually *saw* the cat catch the mouse again… but stopped it killing it and then, for some bizarre reason I don’t understand, they made the cat drop it and let the mouse run free in the house again!
Could *we* catch it after that? Nope. Did the *cat* catch it again? Nope. I have no idea if it is still alive in here or the cat caught it and ate it, or it died off from ‘natural causes’ and is polluting some part of our home with it’s remains. However, I can tell that for a little while at least, it *was* alive around the house.
How do I know this I hear you ask… get on with the story!! Well I know because as I was cleaning off my desk today, ready to install the computer for my youngest daughter I moved the speakers behind my pretty little 22″ Asus monitor… and there they were… piles of small mouse droppings! Ewww…!!! How long they’d been there I don’t know, I rarely move either speakers or monitor so it could be yesterday… could be a month ago – who knows… but the mouse, or*a* mouse, had been sitting on my desk (that’s sitting with an ‘h’)!! 🙂
So. Now I have to ‘wait and see’ if it returns and does it again. If it does then it clearly *is* still alive… or some ghostly relict of it… and I’ll need to put traps down to try to finish it off once and for all.
Things could easily have been worse of course. This morning I came downstairs at 4:30 a.m. in a daze as usual and let the dogs out into the back garden to relive their bursting bladders. As they bolted out… the cat bolted in (she’s part feral and never really likes being indoors). As she dashed through the door I noticed her whiskers seemed a little longer on one side that usual and thought “Oh gawd… here we go again.” and yup, she had another mouse.
Despite my mental state I was a little more prepared this time and quickly found a small bowl ready to trap it when she let it go, as she would… as all cats do. Anyway, she dropped it. To my amazement the mouse just sat there shivering. Lord knows how long she’d been playing with it before bringing it in but it clearly thought its time had come and was simply unable to move to protect itself any further. She grabbed it again and started wandering around, now with both dogs sniffing at both her *and* the mouse. She dropped it again, and *this* time I was able to drop the bowl on it before she was able to get her teeth near it. I slipped some paper underneath it, carried it outside and threw it into the garden. Shortly afterwards, after a feed of her usual food, she went out again… no doubt to hunt down the poor thing again if it hadn’t managed to crawl off somewhere to die in peace away from the ravenous maw of our little puss cat.
Well yes… I *do* see the paradox here. Why am I trying to kill off *one* ‘mouse in the house’, whilst trying to save another? Actually it’s relatively easy to resolve. I’ve mentioned here before that we quite like ‘nature in the raw’ as far as possible and to a large extent we try not to interfere with what goes on outside the doors of our domicile. If the garden is overrun with mice… so be it… as long as they don’t come indoors.
Once indoors they are ‘fair game’ and will be dispatched with little ceremony if they can be caught. Same goes for cockroaches, butterflies, bees, crickets… or anything else that creeps, crawls, flies or hops into the house. If possible I will catch all but cockroaches alive and throw them outside where they belong. If not… sorry but it’s out with the bug spray, traps swats or whatever to get rid of them. Cockroaches of course differ in that they are revolting little creatures and the less there are living with or around me the happier I am… so they get stamped on, chopped, flattened or sprayed whenever we see them. And those *we* don’t get… I leave to the gentle mercy of the mice who seem to love chomping them up. Sounds disgusting to me, but I’m no mouse!!
See? It’s actually all in a nice balance… aaahhhh… balance. Nature?? It’s fine in it’s place… and it’s place is ‘out there’. Having said that… I *will* be checking behind my speakers a lot more regularly from now on! Especially since I had the horrible thought that perhaps the one lost in here… might have been a pregnant female!?! Oh dear… how nice. Not. 😀
The Eclectic Interweb 