I live in a house that, if it ever had mice, hasn’t for the last four decades at least. (The proof of this is that right after we moved in my kid crawled back in the kitchen lazy susan to find out what was blocking it, and it was a vintage unopened box of Count Chocula, circa 1978–it has an offer on the side, good until March 1978.) If there had been mice, even mice with a discerning palate, I’m pretty sure they would have chewed into it just to see.
I have two cats. One of them doesn’t mess around. She ridded my last place of mice, where I was beginning to really have a problem, within four days after her arrival. She catches them, sends their souls to mouse heaven, and leaves the carcass some place where one of her humans will step on it, generally barefoot.
The other one is a lazy slacker most of the time but he does need an occasional mouse fix. He has to leave the yard. Then he comes hopping over the fence with his mouse playmate for the next couple of hours. He is very disappointed when they stop playing, but at that point he eats them. To console himself.
Well. After many years of no mouse problem, suddenly I have mice in my garage. I believe he has brought them here so he will have an unlimited supply and can play after dark (he is an outdoor cat but has a sundown curfew). When I send the good mouser into the garage he goes in to “help” her, she gets in a huff and leaves.
He also has been jumping on my desk and severing the connection between the monitor and the computer, in fact he just did it again. I’m thinking he needs a good talking to and maybe probation.
That was exactly my reaction. Since I’m not an animal person. (pause to look around…how did I get in this thread?)
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You need termination, but Cat5 is a point to point cable system and the terminating resistors are on the port end, not the cable end. The old coax system was multi point, and you had to manage the termination at the ends based on how you ran the wires.
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OP - do you provide a retirement plan for said cat?
-D/a
I question your first assumption. Perhaps it is related to breed more than upbringing.
The reason I say that is all our family’s cats were non-breed specific, but few came from a feral or barn-like environment. Most were reared in luxury (at least having enough to eat), but they all seemed to learn to be mousers on their own.
If the opportunity arose, they found small rodents and killed them. We alternated between an urban environment in the winter and a rural one at a summer house. In the urban environment, most of our cats’ chasing happened at the window, salivating at birds. In the rural one, it was “a mouse a day keeps the vet away.” How did we know they caught them? Because they rarely ate the whole meal, just the head ( :eek: ) and left evidence behind.
Your problem is you have the wrong animal completely. My Brussels Griffon’s ancestors were bred a bazillion years ago as mousers and there isn’t a moving target in my home that will survive for an hour. Spiders, lizards, grasshoppers or sadly my daughter’s pet hamster and a couple of really pretty cardinals, that judging from the mess I came home to, put up one hell of a fight. (Still haven’t figured out how he managed to get one bird, let alone two from the back yard and get them through the doggy door into the house.) Get a toy breed dog, that mouse wouldn’t have stood a chance.
We had a Tom cat that was raised indoors from kittenhood and, when he got too big, we started letting him outside and he caught mice in the garage and shed just fine.
Not sure if I posted about this here when it happened this past summer. I was sleeping on my back one night and was awakened by my (recently deceased) cat who was furiously attempting to burrow under me and had one paw extended pretty far under my back. It was not that unusual for him to wake me up in the middle of the night for some attention but this was something different. I pulled him out from under me and tossed him on the floor. But…I could still feel his twitching paw under me. I leapt out of bed and turned the light on and yep, it was a barely alive mouse. I picked it up by the tail at which point the cat jumped from the floor and batted the mouse out of my hand. It hit the bed, suddenly revived, and took off like a shot, never to be seen again.
Yup. Our cat was adopted as a young kitten and gets well fed (maybe even a bit too well-fed - she’s looking a trifle round these days). Nonetheless, she is one nasty mouse-murdering machine - a regular Jill the Ripper. I never even knew there were so many mice outdoors - she often gets several a night. Unfortunately, she likes to decorate the front porch with their heads and guts.
Best mouser we ever had was self taught, blind*, deaf from birth and had all his whiskers chewed off by the dog on a regular basis. I have no idea how he did it.
*Apparently eating dog food is bad for kitties’ eyes. I know this now.
Ha! That would’ve been a great name. No, sadly, his name was Cat Cat. Seriously. It’s my brother’s fault. But yes, I suspect smell and perhaps vibrations of the floor were how he made sense of the world…and found his victims.
I think she considered doing the killing to be the bounty.
You’d never believe it to look at her - the most domestic and friendly cat you ever saw soliciting tummy-rubs - but when it comes to mice, she’s a four-footed Vlad the Impailer, delighting in death and mutilation. And proud display of the resulting bits.
This. We had a toy terrier a few years ago. At one point I decided to clean out an old shed that hadn’t been opened in a few years. The terrier followed me in there and immediately began pawing at a sheet of plywood that was leaning against a wall. When I pulled that plywood away it disturbed a whole nest of rats and they came pouring out. The terrier went to work. In short order she had killed seven rats. The amazing thing was how brutally efficient she was at it. She wold pounce on a rat, snap its neck and then move straight to the next target. Now, we got her as a puppy and I certainly never gave her any special training. She just killed rats out of pure instinct.
My first choice would be a mongrel barn cat. They’re bred to be nimble enough to dodge around stomping hooves, and zone out unimportant noises and focus on prey sounds. Also they generally seek out larger animals for warmth, and in a house that means a person, so they’re good heater cats.
