Dear cat,
You are very cute. I don’t mind the excess fur in the house, and the occasional midnight waking for a face licking. But I have to draw the line somewhere. Maybe I was lax in my education, so here is an informative picture for you. This is not a cat toy it is a shrew. Should you find one in the house, you should let me know. I know you understand the concept of being an alarm-kitty since you tell me about every insect and spider inside and every bunny and birdie outside. Since you won’t fess up the details after our little interrogation session, I have to assume that A) you found this in the bedroom or bathroom, B) you played with it for a while and then C) let it crawl under my trunk at the foot of my bed and die. I also have to assume by it’s state of stiff, but smelly if disturbed, that this happened at least a few weeks ago. This means we have been sharing our cozy little apartment with a rotting rodent for a while. I slept right above it in blissful ignorance, but you knew it was there…how could you sleep at night?
In the future, if you should find a shrew, or anything else that might be a shrew, you should A) immobilize it, preferrable with a quick bite through the spine at the neck, B) kill it quickly and neatly and C) tell me about it! That is all…please return to your regularly scheduled catnap while I try to come to terms with the fact I have been sharing my bedroom with the rotting corpse of a shrew.
Well, it is much closer than my original ID. I picked up the trunk and saw roundish on one end with a pointy tip and thin stick on the other and though ‘dry leaf’ until I picked it up by the ‘stem’ and learned that leaf tip=pointy shrew nose.
Our cat’s hunting instincts are also, shall we say, not well-honed. These instincts fail to go beyond the “perk up” stage. I mean, oh boy, can our cat perk. Perk most impressively. Perk up, and stare. “Hey! That sound . . . That sounds like something I should care about! I think I’m going to look very intently in that direction. Yes, indeed. Intently. WHOA! What’s that? Holy cow, that sure is interesting! I’d better freeze completely while I watch it. Strange, I have a feeling that I should be doing something . . . to . . . that . . . thing . . . or . . . with . . . it . … but I can’t quite figure out wha—Hey, Christ Almighty, watch where you’re going with that frying pan! You damn near stepped on my tail! And whatever that thing was, you done chased it away with all that banging the pan on the floor. Sheesh! What was that thing anyway? Sure was interesting! Well, I’m gonna take a nap. Bye!”
Outside of of the mousetrap, any dead mice around our place expired of natural causes.
When I was about five, the cat caught a mole in the back yard and brought it into the house to play with. Dad despatched the mole with a shovel after taking it outside. The cat never liked him after that.
When I read the thread title I thought it said Memo the Cat. Memo. Good name for a cat.
Regarding the particulars of our co-residence agreement, although pest control does tecnhically fall under your auspices and disposal of same is your responsibility, it still seems reasonable and prudent for me to react in a forceful manner in cases such as this where the security of the home, as agreed upon by you as the owner, has been compromised.
In future, should I happen to encounter another intruder such as this, I assure you that I will alert you to your presence. Would you like me to leave it in one of your shoes, or just drop it on your face while you are sleeping?
See, this I expect from my cat. Except for tasty bugs, she is usually not into killing. The only thing I can figure is that the shrew looked alot like the little rabbit fur toy mice and the kitty made a mistake in ID too. My dad was moving the other end of the trunk and though it was a toy mouse, so that would be understandable.
Actually I was thinking:
Palin: And I believe you’re working on an anagram version of Shakespeare?
Idle: Sey, sey - taht si crreoct, er - ta the mnemot I’m wroking on “The
Mating of the Wersh”.
Palin: “The Mating of the Wersh”? By William Shakespeare?
Idle: Nay, by Malliwi Rapesheake.
But it sure had ‘play dead’ down pat.
This is where kitty toys go when she wants to play fetch with the sleeping xbuckeye so let’s not give the kitty any ideas. The shoes would be OK though, since I usually check them anyway.
Definitely not a “few weeks”. If so, the shrew would likely have passed from the “stiff but smelly” phase into the “dead but moving” phase so graphically described in the recent maggots thread.
I may have a shrew problem…but I would have noticed the flies. Besides, if I didn’t the cat would have told me all about them. I don’t live in a vermin-infested hell-hole, just an apartment building with a passing vermin or two. And actually, I am leaving it for a nice condo without so much rat…er…shrew in it.
If you don’t want this to happen again, you need to do one or more of the following things:
Eliminate all remaining rodents and hermetically seal your domicile.
Get rid of the cat.
Stop feeding the cat.
…because maintaining the status quo means, to kitty, the little shrew isn’t so much a snack as a wonderfully-animated plaything and an extra-special prize. Your cat isn’t hungry; and shrews probably don’t taste as good as cat food. So why eat them? Torturing them to death, on the other hand, is sublime fun. It doesn’t seem to dawn on the cat initially that once the shrew really stops moving, it’s not going to move ever again. So maybe it’s a good idea to hide it somewhere, just in case. Or maybe the other cats in the house might like to play a little too (you’re just kitty’s mom, you know…you’re one ugly excuse for a cat, but kitty is willing to overlook this for now, so long as you’re still putting out).
xbuckeye, now that your memo has been answered, would you mind if I added one of my own? If you do, I apologize for the following.
Memo to the Cat:
Dear Toast,
If you ever piss in my sandals again, that’s what you’re going to be.
Thank you for your cooperation. yellowval
(Okay, so I’m not really going to toast her. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to yesterday morning when I stepped into my black sandals. They’re now in the garbage.)
The best* thing my cat ever dragged into the house was a headless chipmunk. Yum.
*worst
I rescued a mole from the cat in the yard once too; that mole was the softest thing I ever touched. I released it in the local woods to get eaten by something else.
