Law of the House #4: Great green globs...

So, our barn cat Lily is a stone-cold killer. Yesterday, she bagged this beauty:

This is at least the third one she's nailed, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure where she keeps coming up with the damn things. I would have thought if we had that big of a gopher problem, we'd have, you know, seen one or two. The only one's I've ever seen are the ones she carries triumphantly around the yard. It's sort of like one of those nature shows with a leopard hauling a deer into a tree, just in miniature. She's got two kittens right now (despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to get any pictures yet -- Lily is pretty much wild, and the kittens are all the way, they just scatter as soon as they see me). But she didn't share with them; just sat out in the yard and ate the whole thing herself. Well, almost. For some reason she saw fit to leave the head sitting in the middle of the driveway; I was kind of tempted to glove up and impale it on one of the fence posts as a warning to the rest of the rodent bastards.

Now, our inside cats, Malika and Wesa, well, they apparently lack real hunting prowess. We adopted these two from a friend who had to get rid of them before a move, and while we originally intended to have them be outdoor-only pets like the rest of our cats, then the night before we got them we saw a mouse in the house and decided having some cats indoors might solve that problem. This morning, they seemed to be paying an inordinate amount of attention to a big wicker basket/chest thing we have.

 

Wesa

Malika

So I move the basket, there's the mouse, it ducks back under. Since the cats are still circling, I figure, if I tip it up they'll grab it. So I do. And they rush in... and then nothing. They sort of bat at it a couple times and follow it with dumb looks on their faces until it escapes by climbing under the damn dishwasher. So, I guess it's back to old school and setting out mousetraps, since the cats, apparently, are completely worthless. 

But hey, since I'm posting pictures of all of them, our other animals might as well get their 15 minutes of fame in blog-land. Our tomcat, Paul:

And, last but not least of those with photographic representation, our dog, Dakota. She's a seven year old Beagle with dwarfism (hence why she looks a little stumpy.) Hard to ask for a better dog than she's been. Interestingly, she was something of a happy accident. We'd actually gone to the people we got her from because a fraternity brother of mine was getting a fox terrier puppy from them, and we were going to get one too. Turns out, they'd sold the rest of the fox terriers already by the time we got there, but had Dakota left out of the beagle litter. Apparently, nobody wanted her because she was so runty (the rest of the puppies had bullied her so much that they'd chewed all the hair off the tip of her tail and the ends of her ears.) Were I a richer man, I'd have her cloned.

We also have a parakeet named Petrie and four hermit crabs (Butters, Khan, Zoidberg, and Chowder).

Now, I'm going to go enjoy my nightcap: