[pf] An interesting early Tuesday morning: long grass, rats, sunrise.

· Around dawn (it's 7:43 AM on a spring Tuesday, now), our cat who has had
a kidney removed and is old enough to have only 80% use of the other, came
in with a large rat dangling from his jaws.

· We have a procedure for these live rat or mouse occasions, so he quite
happily took it into the passage with all the doors closed, to play with
then kill; at least usually he does. He's really healthy now, though the
vet, after removing the cancerous kidney, told us he'd probably need
injections every month or so; I believe the cat's enjoyment of living with
us (we communicate quite well - body-language, position, etc.), and these
whole animals he catches then eats, have (I'm sure) improved his health so
that he's normal again.

· By the way, one of the reasons I'm writing this is because Priscilla and
Arianna are or will be out in the country, with long grass and other
rat-and-mouse hideyholes all around, so expect them. Before this
neutered-male cat got good at rat-catching, I was good at using rat-traps
(baited with either cheese or peanut butter, and set hair-trigger), so I
have no worries about rats. Mice are almost too easy.

· Anyway, our 26yo son Peter, asleep at the end of the passage (we run our
ménage as if all under this roof are flat-mates, independent people sharing
the same facilities; flat=apartment), came out and watched for a while -
the thumps and squeaks woke him, I'd guess. He and my wife (by now in at
work) are nominally responsible for the cat when its owner is away; Ruth is
house-sitting not far from the University, for people who went to Europe
for 5 weeks.

· When it was clear to me that the cat was unlikely to kill this rat, a big
and aggressive one, I started preparing a large bottle to catch and kill
the rat with, using my version of chloroform: methylated spirits (it
speeds-up the suffocation). Those who don't like reading about this sort of
thing should delete now.

· Peter decided to take a hand. He got two leather gardening gloves (I
recommend you get a pair if these, Arianna and Priscilla) and after a
couple of minutes of chase, grabbed the rat in his left hand (he's
right-handed; he's done this before); the cat was quite excited, but I
think was glad Pete got involved.

· After discussing with me whether to cut its head off with a sharp, strong
knife (another thing you two'll need!), using a block of wood, he simply
rotated his right hand backward, grabbed the rat's head strongly and
twisted, breaking its neck.

· Then he put the twitching body down, the cat inspected it, then took it
away and started eating it.

· Pete was a little shaken; he was /very/ glad to have someone like me to
talk to about the whole thing.

· A little later, I walked up to the store for a loaf of bread. The sun had
not yet risen, but there was enough light that I could go bare-foot, i.e.
able to see any broken glass on the sidewalk.

· On the way back, I noticed that, over in the West, there was a band of
grey down near the horizon - no, not smog! - on which the sun had not yet
risen, but the sun /was/ shining on the top of a distant cumulo-nimbus
(rain-producing) cloud. A cool and pleasant morning.

· Eventually, we found the cat didn't eat the whole rat, as he usually
does, so we took the carcass down the garden to the place where we put our
food scraps; if we did it properly, it'd be a compost heap, but we don't
have much of any kind of rubbish, so one bucket-full's rotted down to
almost nothing by the time we bring the next.

· And all that by about sunrise!

· I'm going into perhaps too much detail in the belief that many on this
list live in a rich-people's ghetto, and have little or no exposure "real
life": what happens in the world that 95% of people live in.

David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/index.html
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