As a juxtaposition to my previous post on my WordPress ‘memory jar’ site – I have also had a number of pet rodents as I was growing up, from mice to gerbils to my pet rat “John” (the name gives you an idea of my age at this point) and finally hamsters whilst at college. John rat was one of my favourites and a rescue from my mother’s school, where he needed too much attention as his teeth would not grow straight and hence had to be cut regularly.
So yes, I love both rodents and their nemesis cats – who knew!
My current cat “Charlie” likes mice and rats – he doesn’t kill them and/or eat them he just likes to “play with them”. Although I love the sound of birdsong and birds in general, they just don’t have the intelligence of mice and rats. I am particularly impressed by the ‘clever’ ways that mice just seem to run rings around cats and how canny they can be. We’ve even had a mouse (caught by a previous cat) who managed to hide underneath his food bowl – now that’s smart!
The problem with Charlie is that far from removing mice from our home, we’ve had to resort to mouse traps, because he is forever losing them. So unlike my parent’s cats in France where they really noticed the increase in mouse population upon the death of the last of their 2 cats, we have the opposite problem. I can’t help thinking that we have more mice than we would have if we didn’t have a cat.
bibbysmith 