Friday, 16th May 2008.

Pet Peeves

There are several things our cats can do to annoy me. One is miaowing loudly and painfully at three in the morning, as Tabitha did back in March when she was on heat. Another is to vomit on the carpet; said vomit is usually foul-smelling, difficult to clean up and accompanied by little tufts of hair.

Another thing that annoys me is when they empty their bowels on the floor - something they do comparatively little of. We've actually house-trained them by leaving the litter tray outside during the day, but covered over so as to encourage them to find somewhere else to use as a latrine. Emily built up to this point by having the tray in the bedroom when we first got them, before moving it progressively further and further down the corridor and across the hall until it made the kitchen. The tray now only comes into the kitchen at night, when we shut them in.

Moppet's favourite habit is to wait for us to move the tray from porch to kitchen floor and then to immediately use it, positioned in such a way that her rear end hangs over the edge of the tray, thus depositing her load squarely onto the kitchen floor. Said floor is lino and therefore easy to clean, but that's hardly the point. Having done this, Moppet will then dig her paws into the litter and furiously kick out the piles of stones at a rate of knots, like one of the burrowing rabbits in Watership Down. Before you know it the carefully tended litter is gone, and instead we have a heap of stones spread haphazardly over the kitchen, more than a few of them coating a squishy pile of faeces on the very surface inhabited by Thomas when he's crawling around after lunch, picking up the food that he dropped during his meal. At which point I sigh, and get the dustpan and disinfectant.

This morning, however, our two felines surpassed themselves. I walked into the lounge to find a small, furry thing lying on the carpet. I approached it gingerly, thinking it would be a mouse. It turned out to be a baby bird. Instantly I went to the kitchen for some paper in which to wrap it, and that was when I noticed the other one. Tabitha sat in the doorway, rolling around in expectation: she wanted me to make a fuss of her. It was fairly obvious who the culprit was.

I picked up the first bird, cradling it gingerly. It was no bigger than a USB pen drive. I went for the other one, which turned out to be not quite dead yet, although it was quite clear from the way that it writhed in my hand that it soon would be. I prayed that they'd fallen out of their nest after being abandoned by their mother, and hoped that Tabitha hadn't actually found the nest. The cat was now sitting by the fridge, watching as I scurried back and forth looking for more kitchen roll. "Look at me," she seemed to be saying proudly. "Aren't I clever?"

I chucked both birds in the hedgerow outside, and hoped that the cats wouldn't find them there later. In a way it's inevitable. Both Tabitha and Moppet are natural hunters, and they're even slimmer and lighter than Woody, who himself managed to bag a few trophies in his time with us. I don't want to fight the natural order of things, and I know that the fact that Tabitha brought her offerings into the house was probably only a sign of affection. Still, I do wish that she'd done it when the boys weren't around, because that compounded the situation further, and meant that my immediate priority was getting the baby starlings (or whatever) out of the house before they could be discovered. Classroom management theory teaches us to see the problem before it occurs, and in this instance I could visualise things clearly: Joshua would have prodded the dead bird and asked what it was. Thomas would have tried to eat it.