Tonight I'm more excited than I have been in a while. Here's why. In casual conversation with hubby, we talked about how neither of our two remaining cats (Tiger and Frankie--click "Cats" to see my recent cat history) seem to have any mousing ability whatsoever. I thought it was instinctive! Not!
We have let the two out to the garage on many occasions, and I had been hoping that the usual pre-Spring mouse population would be kept in check. However, last week I was made to jump out of my skin when I went out to the garage to leave for work and a big mouse hopped out of the birdseed bag on a face-high shelf about 4 feet from me and ran down a rake handle to the floor. (No, I didn't hop around screaming, but it did make me jump!) I haven't seen a mouse in the garage since I cleaned it several years ago and started having Storm spend time out there periodically.
ANYWAY, so when I mentioned that we might have to get a young female mouser, hubby right away suggested we might try to catch and tame the two Manxes I wrote about just below. They are such beautiful cats! And more importantly, at least one of them (recall, I don't even know their genders) has been catching voles out of my garden pretty regularly, I think. (The voles ate everything with a thick root 2 years ago but now the population is way down.) At least I have seen them hunting over in my gardens and one time I found a dead vole laid out in the middle of a section.
So, I'm starting to plan how we can do this, what we should do about taming them...keeping in mind that it may not be possible at all. Must keep that in mind. They may be too shy, they may not get along with Tiger and Frankie; they may not want to use the litter box; if one's a male he may spray; they may have an incurable disease...there are lots of things which could go wrong, but just the possibility is exciting to me!
Maybe you could try starving your cats so that they'll have to catch mice? No, that's a bad idea. Good luck with finding the perfect mouser.
ReplyDelete