Kill Blog #5

Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh. Sweet baby girl kitty is inside the house with a rat right now. I hate to say it, but I ran outside, shut the door, and am just waiting for her to put it out of its misery. I saw her in the bathroom next to what I thought was a corpse, but as I grabbed a grocery bag and moved in to pick it up, it dragged itself into an empty t.p. roll (PepPurr's previous toy), which made her all kinds of excited. Now I have a quandary. I'm pretty sure the thing is critically injured but there's no way I can bring myself to finish the job, either deliberately or by slow suffocation in a grocery bag at the bottom of a garbage can. I may be a country girl who has held her share of chickens on the chopping block, but that was a long time ago. Hell, even my dad takes his chickens to a professional "renderer" these days.

As I stood in my tiny bathroom and pondered what to do, PepPurr worked the poor creature out of its hiding place and started to fling it dangerously close to my face, causing me to squeal a little girl and go running out of the house, chasing my dog in front of me.

She just came out the window without the rat. Wish me luck on a quick, clean find. I'm going in.

Update: after a frustrating search with a very excited dog trying to prove the ratter in her bloodline, I finally discovered it on the back of the couch right where I sit. At least it looks like it ended without much trauma. Sigh.

Kill Blog #4 - Survivors

Last night was a long, sleepless night. Difficult as it was for me, it was tougher for the little family that met my monster menagerie. I think I was able to save each one, though. Here's how it went down:

PepPurr. The dog wakes me up at 3:30am. I can hear the bell on my little black kitty's collar tinkling enthusiastically, along with an occasional thud that can only mean one gruesome thing. I let the dog down off the bed, put on shoes and pants, grab a bag from under the kitchen sink, and head to the bathroom to investigate. The dog is losing her little mind trying to see what's happening in the bathtub. PepPurr is sitting in the tub staring at a tiny little bunny rabbit hopping around. I pause for a moment to admire PepPurr's ingenuity at preventing the rabbit from hopping away in the darkness, then swoop in and grab the bunny. I walk across a soaking wet field, deposit it through a hole in the giant fence separating our property from the elementary school and ball field next door, and watch it hop away. Well done, MathMercy. Now back to bed.

Savvy. The dog wakes me up at 4:30am. This is getting old. I have to be up in three hours. A quick inspection fails to turn up cats or any other critters in the house, but the dog is unconvinced. I let her out the back door and start making some tea. A plaintive cry calls me outside, where I discover my big gray cat teasing a little bunny in the grass. Oh yeah, bunnies cry. When I try to grab the rabbit, the cat picks it up and starts hissing and growling. He is often my sweet lover kitty, but Savvy is sixteen pounds of muscle, fang, and claw, and in this moment he is pure hunter. I try unsuccessfully to make him release the bunny and end up watching him carry it over the fence. We repeat this little sequence four or five times over the next 30 minutes. At 5:00 I finally succeed in getting both cats shut inside the house and head back to pick up the rabbit. My dog beats me there and trots off with the bunny. She is much less experienced than the cat, so I have no trouble prying her jaw apart and rescuing the bunny, who is miraculously still alive. I snap a photo, slip it through the fence onto the ball field, and congratulate myself on the second rescue of the night.

Lola. Holy fuck. Are you kidding me? It's 5:30am. It sounds like PepPurr has a bunny in the living room. I put on my shoes and head out, but I find the cat eating cat food and the dog watching me calmly from the couch. Huh. That's weird. I start looking for an abandoned bunny. It takes me a few minutes to realize that Lola is watching me calmly from the couch with a bunny in her mouth. A minute later, Bunny #3 joins Bunny #2 on the ball field. I hope their mama finds them. If she doesn't, though, I am counting on the elementary school kids to take them in.

Losing all that sleep was a pain, but it was nice to be able to rescue something this week. Last week, I realized that I know the sound of Savvy crunching bones, as he dissected and consumed a rodent in the hallway at 7:30am every day Tuesday through Friday. Worst alarm clock ever. I took photos every day, but Thursday and Friday are pretty gross and I prefer the live bunny. No death pictures today!

Kill Blog #3

This rat was whole when I went to the bathroom. When I came out a few minutes later...it wasn't. At least I have definitively solved the mystery of what happens to the missing rodent parts: He eats them. When I moved him away from the guts so I could clean them up, he just moved to the body and started (gag) crunching bones.

Kill Blog #2

They produce a lot less blood and gore than your typical rodent, but dead birds are still lame because their little downy feathers get everywhere.  I think this little birdy just had his little birdy heart ripped out.

Damn it. I just swept and mopped that floor yesterday, psycho!

I should have suspected the kill would be waiting for me in the hall when I woke up to a pile of lovey pets on the bed. Homicidal kitty cats get really affectionate when they have death on the breath.

Kill Blog #1

A friend suggested that I start a kill blog for my sweet sociopath pets. Since I definitely get more death in my house than dates, it seems like a reasonably entertaining way to stave off writers' block. If you have a weak stomach or can't handle witnessing the circle of life in suburbia, you might just want to skip any Kill Blog posts, including this one. 

As I've mentioned before, I am blessed to have three very distinct funny, furry personalities in my home: one dog and two cats who take protecting the house from rodent infestation very seriously. The cats have access to come and go as they please, which means they sometimes often bring their "work" indoors. Tonight when I came home from a night out with my friend L, my dog was super excited to show me this dead mole in the bathroom. 

I'm not sure what the deal is with moles. I think the cats bring them in, kill them, decide they are too small to deal with, and stash them just under the dryer to torment the dog. This is the third one Lola has alerted me to in the past week. At least moles are teeny and rarely mutilated when I find them in the house. Birds and rodents on the other hand are usually a bit, um...messier.

I won't rehash all the former kills. There will be plenty more in the future, I'm sure. However, allow me to tell you about one particularly bloody weekend. It is kind of gross, but you have to be just a little impressed with the sheer volume and creativity.

Friday (The Trifecta)

• 6:30: Lola starts freaking out and begging to be let down off the bed. I’m pretty sure that means one of the cats has brought a gift and I don’t want to deal with it, so I let the dog down and pull the blanket over my head and pretend to sleep.
• 7:00: Whimpering and running around on the hardwood floors hasn’t stopped, so I get up to investigate.
• 7:02: Clean up rat head, rat tail, and random rat innards from the hallway. Let the dog outside. (#1) 
• 7:15: Dog won’t come back in, is trying frantically to get at something in/on/around the lawnmower. Cats are also lurking in the vicinity. I move the lawnmower all around to prove there is nothing there, but dog is not convinced.
• 7:25: Dog is losing her mind trying to dig under the lawnmower, so I turn it over to, once again, prove there is nothing there. Only there is. A freaking rat is clinging to the bottom. I run and grab a bag and broom.
• 7:26: As I try to gently extract the rat to relocate it to a safer home, the dog swoops in, plucks the rat up by the tail, starts shaking it like a squeaky toy, and runs triumphantly off to her hiding place under the porch swing. By the time I get across the yard, the rat is dead. Despite the fact that the cats make me deal with death almost daily, I am somehow totally traumatized to see my sweet fluffy lover dog take such glee in killing something right in front of me. (#2)
• Sometime that evening: Black kitty is playing with two halves of a rat in the hallway. (#3)

Saturday/Sunday (The Lesson)

My friend T called me on Saturday night and asked if I wanted to meet her and some friends for a drink. Since I hadn't yet changed into my sweats (you know I love them!), I decided that it would be just as easy to say yes as it would be to say no. I left the house around 9:00 and headed down to Ballard. I had a great time and for the first time in probably over a decade, I ended up staying out all night. 

When I arrived home at 8am, I noticed something seemed amiss. Nothing major, just a few papers strewn about, like the cats had gotten a little rambunctious. I let the dog out to pee and then started to head off to bed. However, I was stopped by the sight of my slippers where I'd left them in the middle of the living room. Only now, one of them was decorated with a rat foot, a rat tail, and a neat little package of rat organs. Do you understand what I am telling you? There was a little rodent still life artfully arranged on my slipper. I grabbed a paper towel and a grocery bag and leaned in to start the cleanup. It was then that I noticed the rat head, eye wide open, staring at me from INSIDE MY SLIPPER. (#4)

I get it, kitties. You are cute, furry, little four-legged mobsters. You leave me disgusting little messages to teach me not to spontaneously stay out all night. I'm just going to clean this up and go to bed...What the hell is that bird doing on top of the bookshelf?

In my exhaustion and shock over the slipper, I had failed to notice that the cats were both keenly focused on a little bird sitting on top of the bookshelf. I opened the door and the bird started to fly towards it, but the little black kitty jumped from the back of the couch, grabbed the bird in her mouth and carried it off under the bed. 

Luckily, the bird made its way to a corner behind the nightstand where I was able to retrieve it and release it outside. (#4.5) Later that evening, I caught black kitty once again playing with two halves of a rat in the hallway (#5.5). 

My garbage collectors must hate me.