Nature red in tooth and claw

[devi]

It's official, the cats hate me now. They are crouching behind me, looking balefully at me and hissing. I committed an unforgivable sin. I took away Winston's prey.

He came in and started to scuffle around behind the sofa. I thought he might be playing with the dice I gave him. I had a look down there but saw nothing moving. So I went into the kitchen and then, in the corner of my eye, I saw a mouse sprinting for freedom down the hallway, Winston in hot pursuit. I opened the door to let it out and closed it before the cat caught up. "Run, mouse, run!" I said. I hoped the delay while the cat got over his confusion and out through the cat flap would be enough. It wasn't. He strutted back in with the mouse in his mouth and proceeded to bat it about, swing it by its tail and other foul tortures. Now I love cats, but I also have great affection for mice and rats and I sure as heck wasn't going to watch one be beaten and nibbled to death in front of me. I pulled him away by his tail. He was alive, but there was a large hole in his neck. I wrapped the poor little guy up in a copy of Property Weekly and took him out to the roadside to die with dignity. But one horrible thought remains. Would you have had the guts to put him out of his misery? I certainly didn't.

"Mew," says Winston accusingly, and goes out slamming the door. He's a teenager, all right. Oh, hang on, he's back and on my lap. No one ever said cats were consistent.

Comments

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

It depends on how big the hole in his neck was. If it was a horrible gash, yes, I would have.

*But*. I/we have fancy rats, which means we always have the means for a painless rodent death on-hand. (I'd say roughly two-thirds of our rats have needed to be put to sleep after the hours that vet offices are usually open). So it'd be easy for me--much easier than it would have been for you, I think.

[juliet]

I was about to ask how you manage that (I have pet rats, as well, & although have only had to go to emergency out-of-hours vet to have a rat put to sleep once, I would *far* rather do it at home anyway as a general rule :-/ ), but then looked at your userinfo & you're in the US where medical rules etc are rather different. Ah well.

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

Let's put it this way: our vet trusts us enough to prescribe stuff to us that other vets might not.

[triskellian]

Thankfully, most of the little treats our cats bring are either thoroughly dead (and intact - I suspect the cats of finding already-dead mice and claiming them) or thoroughly alive (well, alive isn't very "thankfully", because then they need catching, but at least they stand a chance if we let them go at the front of the house, because the cats go out the back). I don't know if I'd be able to kill a half-dead mouse :-(

(Call me when you get up? I have plans ;-)

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I've disposed of a couple of mice our various cats brought in. It's not very nice and I feel very emotionally mixed up and wrong afterwards.

Once a mouse ran into the sitting-room, hotly pursued by cat Posy, and I pounced on it and caught it in my hands before I'd really thought the move through, leading my dad to conclude that I must be part cat.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Oh, hang on, he's back and on my lap

I begin to doubt your commitment to the due process of rehabilitative justice...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I gave him a stern talking-to along the lines of "yes, I know you're a carnivore, but don't do it in the house and upset the humans".

Today he is ripping up phone books instead.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

What, into two halves with his bare paws, angrily? If he can do that, I wouldn't *dare* try taking his mice away from him!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Into a million tiny pieces, which doesn't bode much better for mouse-taking...

[juliet]

If you don't reliably know how to put him out of his misery quickly & relatively painlessly, then best not to (as worse if you screw it up).

I would probably consider taking it down to the vet if in working hours, but I'm not sure tbh :-/

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

If you don't reliably know how to put him out of his misery quickly & relatively painlessly, then best not to (as worse if you screw it up).

Hit it with a brick repeatedly?

[jezzidue.livejournal.com]

.... Hmmm - I once put a rabbit out of it's misery by reversing my car over it. It had mixamitosis and was hiding under my car. Quite harrowing - but it was the right thing to do. But it's a little different - the mouse would have died relatively quickly ... the poor bunny would have suffered for days.

[philipstorry.livejournal.com]

Cats are actually remarkably consistent.

They're "now" creatures. For a cat, the only thing that matters is the present. If you have the promise of a warm lap and a stroknug demeanour, then that's just fine. And what happened a while ago is irrelevant. There will be more mice, just like there will be more laps.

Humans could learn a lot from cats, but I suspect they're usually too afraid of betraying our past or our future to do so...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

That's a very nice way of putting it.

[queenortart.livejournal.com]

Wyatt his brother has developed a bit of a pash for mice and worms and killing plastic carrier bags for fun and profit

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

You have Winston's brother? Cool. Does he have the same sillily pink nose that doesn't really go with his ginger fur but is cute all the same?

(I didn't get comment notifications on this post for ages...)

[queenortart.livejournal.com]

Yup - Winston came from our cat Bear's litter, so there are 4 siblings. I think there are pictures of them when they were little in my pictures - I'll have a look.

Wyatt is black with a black nose and a white sherrif's star on his chest :)

[evilrobotshane.livejournal.com]

Whilst I merrily and enthusiastically kill flies, as a human I'm jam-packed with hypocricy and double standards and when put in a position once to put a baby bird I'd spent several days ham-fistedly attempting to save from an orphan's death out of its misery, I found it very difficult to go ahead with. It eventually died while I was humming and hawing (for about 18 hours), presumably in the misery I'd been tasked with ending, which didn't make me feel good either. Tough decisions.

I do feel that it's a bit disrespectful to eat meat and yet never kill something you eat - if the poor bastard's going to give up its life to provide a tasty meal, surely the least we owe it is to look it in the eye as we do it in. Thus it was that I found myself staring fixedly at a crab as I lowered it into boiling water. I didn't much like that either, but it tasted pretty good. Now I'm surrounded by people whose favourite weekend activity is shooting fuzzy deer with a variety of rifles, muzzle-loaders and bows-and-arrows (!) and am unsure how to reconcile that with my attitudes on doing the decent thing to your dinner.

In Utopia, all slaughtering and butchery is done by slaves and prisoners, so the citizens don't have to sully their psyches with all this. Human double standards being nothing new, obviously.

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm deficient in empathy (I've often though so), but I'm not sure I'd have bothered to intervene in this situation. If I had, I wouldn't have had a problem putting it out of it's misery.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

It's the having lived with two rats that'll do it.

And it wasn't so much the idea of killing it as the decision of *how* - I mean, what would I do, drown it in the sink? Hit it with a heavy object? What sort of heavy object? Thinking about the options made me feel ill :/

I find it hard to even kill earwigs, and I hate earwigs.

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

I lived with a rat in 95-96. Those are both reasonable options.

I think the answer might be to just get on with it, not spend any time thinking about it or trying to work out the optimal solution (good enough is good enough)

SFX: Killing Miranda - "Meat" (Meat is murder, murder tastes good...)