Submitted by megan on Tue, 06/19/2007 - 12:34
This is Freya. She's my cat.
I don't write about her very much - an understatement - because generally, she just hangs out, takes naps in the various boxes I have around the house for her, eats when there are people around to watch, and climbs into whatever lap is handy, as soon as it is created. Very nice, but not all that interesting in terms of blogging.
She loves humans. She purrs as soon as you look at her. She likes a lot of attention, particularly in the morning. Humans love her back. Even humans who don't really like cats say that if all cats were like Freya, they might like cats.
She comes when you call her. Sometimes she makes a weird yodelling sound in the middle of the night, but she usually stops, comes running and jumps up on the bed when I sing "Freya? Freyyyy-ya." She usually only does this in the spring. I think it's because she wants to go outside. But then when I leave the door open, she doesn't go outside. Perhaps fantasy is sometimes better than reality for cats, too.
I have had her for 12 years. She's started to get a little creaky, occasionally missing her leap up onto the couch or the bed. When she gets up after a long nap, she sometimes looks a little stiff. This makes me sad.
She was born male. When she was very very sick with a blocked urethra a couple years ago, she almost had to get an operation to shorten it and open up her penis. During the whole schmozzle, I tried to keep calling her him because the vets I've been to get weirded out if you can't keep the gender of your cat "matching" your cat's hind end. They are particularly weirded out if you switch back and forth.
The only thing that made me smile during those few weeks was the thought of getting my cat bottom surgery.
So she's a sweet nice loveable creature. But not if you're a rodent, winged or otherwise. She's usually pretty good at smacking the bats down as the come out of the basement, and at least stunning them.
Last night I woke up to a noise similar to her yodelling. I singsonged her name a few times. She'd scamper into the room and scamper back out, where she'd meow and jump around more. The last time woke me up right fully, thinking bat bat bat, no, not a bat. No squeaking. No flapping. But I waited another second just in case I'd missed the tell-tale sounds. Nope, nothin doin. Not a bat.
I got up, put on my robe, turned the bedroom light on. There was Freya, dancing around a small furry thing in the hall, tapping it and pushing it around. It wasn't moving. I sighed, went and got my glasses from the bathroom, grabbed a plastic tub from the kitchen - with lid - and went back into the hallway. The mouse still wasn't moving. Poor wee beastie.
In my experience, rodents will play dead so that the thing attacking them will get bored and stop attacking them. This was not the case last night. I put the tub over the mouse, I slid the lid under the tub. It had huge shiny open black eyes. No playing.
What do you do with a dead mouse? I wasn't entirely sure. The last time this happenend (in a different apartment) I flushed the mouse and I've felt guilty ever since. It seems a shame to flush something that might keep something else alive. And mice are much less creepy now that I'm used to bats. So I took my dead mouse and dumped it into the garden. It will either keep a feral neighbourhood cat going for a few hours, or make my lilies more beautiful. Or both.
I know I'm an addicted blogger because it actually occurred to me, at 2 in the morning, that I should hunt out my camera and take a picture of the dead and slightly bloody mouse in my hallway to spice up the post that I would of course be writing. Lucky for you, that insanity didn't last long. And I was too tired.
This is a white-footed mouse, a possible example of the mouse killed by my cat.* 
This one is much cuter than the one I saw. Fewer claw holes, at any rate, which is the same as cuter in my books.
*It may also have been a deer mouse. I don't know how to tell the two species apart, and who the hell is going to look that closely at a dead mouse in the wee smas anway?
Comments
3 comments postedI LOVE that your cat had an operation, that you deemed it to be "bottom surgery," therefore making her a female cat now. That made my day. :)
Oooh, I miswrote. She's always been female to me - I've always called her she. So when she was maybe going to have her penis cut off, there was at least some solace in that fact.
She didn't end up needing it, and thank god for my credit card. She's never seemed too fazed by the difference between her pronoun and her bits, anyway./>/>
You have a white-footed mouse there, cut piicture.
We get white-footed mice in the house every winter here in Minnesota and I have three lovely furr balls who are indoor "hunters". I wrote to comment about how to tell the difference between the white footeds and the deer mice.
We live trap our mice, because we would rather have them in the woods feeding hawks then our kitties. Cats can get parasites and worms too from mice. We know from too many vet bills. When we set the live trap in an area they frequent I noticed they tap their feet loudly as if to warn the others. They are the only mice I know of who do that. So I looked the mice up iin one of my mammel books and they talked about white footed deer mice having that characteristic.
Also, of the two, deer mice do not tend to go in buildings but would prefer to be in the fields and woods and they are less frequently found in houses. But out in the country, chances are high if your little cutie has a white belly with a lovely brown fur, its the white-footeds. They love to come in peoples homes and in warm buildings in the fall before winter. They nest outiside in summer on the property.
BTW, if you or anyone were to live trap them to take them off the property, you need to go at least a mile and a half away. They have great directional radar and will home in and return to your (and their) houseif you just put them out back in the backyard or on your property. So that's why I drive them to a nature preserve and let nature and the hawks n owls take care of them.
Also, their playing dead is VERY convincing. I had a mouse hold his tail straight out, a sign of death and give a few death jerks before "dieing" on me. But I took him to an area where snow covered a juniper while carrying his "dead" self in my warm hands, hollowed out a hole beneath the juniper banches makeing a nice home spot and placed him at the base of the hole. Up he sat and crawed into his new place. Then I put soem seeds at its base to give him a fresh start.
Just a word of caution on bats. My kittie Elvan loves to go after them, but when I learned they carry rabies we sought ways to seal up the house more and make sure our cats shots were up. Its not really them I worry about the cats because of those shots but bats can bite you if you try to pick them up. If a bat seems wounded, best to use gloves and get him away from your kitty. Don't let him bite or you be bitten by the bat. You don't know if the bat is wounded by the cat or if its sick, which can be dangerous. Bats and raccoons have a very high rabbie risk.
Good luck. We love our three kitties, 2 males and a female. They are all different and all a bundle of joy for us and we don't let them out. We have way too many birds we feed and want to protect here.l They seem totally fine with being indoors.
Lynne
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