You might remember a few weeks back me rambling on about a mouse the cat had brought in and released. The cat caught it once more, but after being scolded by the visitors it released the mouse to roam free again in the house… seemingly with a charmed life as from then on neither we nor the cat could catch it.
Times change of course but not a cat’s hunting skills… and we no longer have a moose loose aboot the hoose!
Mid-morning yesterday I was sitting reading something and heard a noise behind me. The cat was standing next to the water cooler poking around on the shelf alongside… suddenly there was a lot of scrabbling and things falling off the shelf and down came the cat… with the mouse in its mouth.
In line with the usual behaviour for a cat it dropped it with the obvious intention of batting it about a bit until she decided it was ready to kill and eat. I got up to ‘intercept’ and hopefully catch the mouse before it ran off and hid.. again. This time however the thing gave just a couple of twitches before the cat picked it up again and stalked off. Maybe being chomped three times finally gave it a heart attack – can’t tell but it seems likely. I’m sure being carried off by a lion or tiger three times would have finished me off!!
Anyway, by the time I’d picked up a box and persuaded the cat to drop it the mouse was definitely ‘nailed to its perch’, an ex-mouse… it had ‘ceased to be’ etc.
So with due reverence… I picked it up… and walked off to throw it out.
I’ve pointed out on here how little intelligence our cat has, even by the limited expectations one usually has of cat intellect… but occasionally I wonder if ours has any sense at all. Despite *watching me* collect the corpse of the mouse, instead of following me as a dog would do, it remained sniffing around where it last saw the thing, perhaps in the hope it might spring out of some hiding place?
For ‘completeness’ I went back and picked up the cat who of course struggled violently until it realised the dead mouse was in the box three inches from its nose… whereupon it went quiet. Stupid animal.
The dead mouse got thrown onto the patio and the cat got thrown after it. I assume she collected it and disposed of it in the usual way but I really didn’t feel like staying to watch. Either way a few minutes later neither were anywhere to be seen.
The end result… we are at last mouseless! Sad for the mouse, but much better for us… probably.
The Eclectic Interweb 