My cat has pets

Yesterday morning, my husband, the kid and I were all sitting at the kitchen counter enjoying a peaceful breakfast when I heard the cat crunching on his food. This was particularly surprising since I had put the cat outside about two minutes earlier. I looked up and, oh holy hell, it was a mouse! Now, our cat doesn’t actually kill mice or rats. What he prefers to do instead is catch them, and bring them home as pets. We had one mouse that lived under our dishwasher for a month before we knew he was there – he never got into our food but was so fat from cat food he morphed from a tiny field mouse to a small Chihuahua.

Of course, being a girl, I shrieked and the mouse ran into a tiny crawl space under our cupboards with no way for us to catch him. However, since there was only one way in, we assumed that there was only one way out… We moved the cat food back a little bit, put some sticky traps under the hole in the crawl space and waited. After a few minutes my husband said he had to go – he was driving the carpool that day. I wasn’t really interested in being part of the mouse homicide, especially when my husband told me that once he was caught I was going to have to brain him with a shovel so he wouldn’t suffer. Um – what?! I knew I had to be brave.

Ten minutes later while I’m sitting at my desk, I hear a giant commotion coming from the kitchen so with absolute dread, I ran in to check the situation. Not good. The mouse had gotten its back feet on the sticky trap but not its front and it was frantically running around the kitchen dragging the trap with it. I ran into the garage to get a bucket - with the plan to just cover it with that, call my husband and make him come home to deal with it. When I got back to the kitchen, the mouse was gone – all that was left was a fur covered sticky trap.

So now we have another mouse that seems to enjoy his daily meals of cat food. We’ve got more traps out and for once, I am happy to be headed out of town.