There are a few side effects to owning cats, of course: not being able to have a decent sofa (a plus to poor students anyway I suppose, since we have an excuse to use our money elsewhere!), having dirt trailed through the house on a regular basis and, of course, as Milton Jones would point out 'our house smells'. But the point I am referring to here is simply: critters.Now, we are relatively lucky with our cats. Yes, they like to hunt (although with an irregularity that means we often forget about this side of feline life), but they have never, as far as we have seen, killed any prey. They have never even injured it as far as we can tell. By the speed the shrews and birds manage to dart around our house, you would assume that anyway- no broken limbs or wings here!
They do though, when hunting, like to grace us with 'presents'. The problem with the gentle, purely intuitive nature of our two, is purely as described above. They bring the things in, all the way in- and then we have to get them out again. Not aided by the cat trying to climb up our legs and back to get to the bird, which has so handily decided to perch on a swinging lampshade.
The other night I got a distressed phone call from my boyfriend telling me to come home asap. Was it a family emergency? Had something happened to the cat? Luckily, no. We just had a curled up baby rabbit hiding amongst the junk we hide under our table in the corner (please say that isn't just us?) and he had no clue how to extract it. I returned home two find four saucer like eyes glaring at us through the back window and had to commence my mission. It was quite a long process really, the poor little thing being scared, as it obviously would be, but with co-ercing, and a few different poking devices, I finally got it into the plantpot which I had, luckily enough, bought earlier that day.
Luckily, he was definitely a wild rabbit (I dread trying to explain that one to your neighbour's children), and a real cutie. The road our cul de sac comes off happens to back onto grassland, fortunately, so we took a walk (quite a long one, since we didn't fancy seeing him again, no matter how cute his twitchy nose) and off he ran, faster than I have ever seen any rabbit run before. Even when Elmer Fudd is chasing them.
We still don't know how the managed to catch the poor thing, or how long he was carrying it around waiting for us unwilling owners to let him present his goods (neighbour reports seem to suggest a while, since there were a few sightings). At least we can say life is never dull though and we don't even have to wait for leisurely summer countryside ambles to see a sampling of local wildlife.
