What The Cat Dragged In
Anyone who has cats will be familiar with the concept of presents.
Because your cat loves you and appreciates you feeding it, stroking it, keeping it warm and providing a loving home for it, it wants to do something for you in return. And what could you possibly want more than a small animal, half-disemboweled and bleeding all over the floor, particularly if you happen to be wandering around in the dark without any slippers on.
I have had a variety of rodents, birds, frogs and indeed many other small animals with various degrees of injury/deadness brought in by my cats in the past (going back through three ‘generations’ of pets). But these ones have gone too far. Too far, I tell you.
The problem is because they are smart animals. They have worked out that if they stand on the shelf in the utility room, they can place their paws on the door handle and push it down to open it; they know the doors in the house which open if you rattle them enough with your paw (a previous pet, Tiger, meant that we needed a child lock on the fridge door, as he worked out how to open that and make off with whatever meat was in it).
Only I didn’t realise how smart they were. Just yesterday they brought home a mouse. Nothing inherently unusual about that, until you consider that the mouse was actually in a trap. Presumably our cats are therefore laying traps for the mice in the vicinity and going around every day or so to check them.
That’s impressive, huh?
(I am aware that there is another possibility — that at least one property within ‘prowling range’ has a mouse problem and the cats weren’t responsible for placing the trap themselves, but frankly I think that’s a bit unlikely…)
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Did you get a picture ??
One of my friend’s cats goes through her bathroom trash can and pulls out only the used q-tips and eats the gross cotton ends off of them. He’s even gotten smart enough to teach himself how to knock over the trash quietly so he’s not caught.
I’m not sure why small injured animals seems less gross to me than used q-tips, but it does.
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