Today is the first mouse free day in quite a long while. With three cats you might think that I’d be expecting this level of gift giving but my previous two cats brought me no more than one or two mice in their entire 19 year lifespans.
We’re averaging one a day, usually alive. On the odd occasion a live mouse cannot be found somewhere, or hunted out from under the piano, behind the back of the wicker basket or dug in under the fireplace, there are usually body bits to be found outside the back door. A head usually.
And I probably prefer the dead mice to the ones that climb up the curtains and have to be picked off by hand.
The cats are happy with either obviously. Usually you can tell which cat brought in the mouse by the level of interest they show in the live creature. None of them are at all interested in the dead ones.
But when they’re alive, it seems cruel and unusual to leave them where the cats can re-catch them yet impossible for such a wuzz as me to kill the things myself, even knowing them for vermin with no bladder control, a disease vector waiting to activate.
So we dutifully walk them across the road to a rough patch of park five or six houses down and hope they live long and happy lives somewhere else. Or more likely, that the oriental cat across the road has them for lunch and doesn’t feel the need to tell us about it.
