There is the long-standing belief that in order to avoid having vermin in the house or barn, especially the rodent variety, a cat is the best solution.  How many times have you heard someone say “Oh, Bootsie is such as good mouser!”  I have, many times.  But more often than not, Bootsie and his feline cohorts are, at best, simply resting on their unearned laurels, or at worst, living on borrowed fame.  I can attest that at least three of our four cats are living the lie.  The events surrounding the Mouse in the House week provided ample first-hand experience on this fact.

Mice are common in the grassy fields that surround the homes and barns of Middle Ranch.  Crawl spaces, hay bales stacks and infinite number of cubbyholes to hide and make nests make Middle Ranch a potential mice heaven.  Rattlesnakes know this and they appear, with some frequency, near the buildings and homes.  The barn sports its own mouser, Mittens, although I have never seen it with the mythical mouse in her mouth, nor have I seen her reject the handful of dry food she gets every morning (she belongs to the Clean Food Bowl Club, as far as I can see). However, the other barn tenants report that they do find bits of mice  in the barn and would have a mouse problem without her.  My biologist training tells me that outdoor cats never lose their skills and abilities as hunters, which is one of the main problems world-wide with feral cats in wilderness areas.  Millions of songbirds, lizards, rodents and insects lose their lives every year to these fantastic hunters.  Nevertheless, mice are common where we live and occasionally one makes it into a house.  Our neighbors have had their share of problems with mice.  The two dogs they have are no match for a ¼ pint-sized tiny rodent, and while they may chase or even try to catch one, they certainly can’t get to the places where these little creatures hide.  Besides, dogs usually sleep all night, often with their owners, showing the wonderful adaptations to people’s lifestyles most dogs have evolved.  Not so cats, right?  Cats are nimble, pure hunters in the flesh, instinctually driven towards the prey that inexorably ends caught between their sharp claws and carnassial (meet shredder) teeth.  Weeell….Welcome to…

Myth # 2: All cats are good mousers

It didn’t take long for our cats to find the mouse and for us to take notice.  The new arrival was announced as Boots, one of our cats (the other three cats that live with us were asleep), sat quietly staring at one of the cat carriers that we keep strategically around the house for them to sleep or hide.  Wedged in a corner near a stack of magazines, Boots, all 20 lbs. of bone, hair and fat (no doubt a thoughtful strategy in preparation for the unthinkable possibility of a day without food in his bowl), sat with his nose close to the bottom edge, a vacant stare in his eyes.  Holding this pose for more than 5 minutes was a clear indication that something alive was hiding behind, under or in the general vicinity of the spot of interest.

“What’s that, Boots?  Is there a mouse in there?” (Sorry to say, but we do talk to these guys like they could understand proper English.  We only use fully-formed sentences and no baby/kitty talk.)

In response, Boots appropriately turned his head around, a puzzled expression on it (believe me, we can tell these things), meowed softly as if saying “Would you believe this?” and went back to staring.

“Honey?  I think Boots found a mouse behind the cat carrier!”

“Good Bootsie!  Is there a mousy in there?” (OK, I fibbed.  We do talk kitty-talk to them, sometimes…)

I looked down into the carrier thinking I will need a flashlight to see what was in there, when a little mouse popped up from behind the carrier, ran around the entrance of it, up the side, through the top, down the other side, and then disappeared behind it again.  I looked at Boots, and he looked back at me with an expression that clearly said, “Did you see that?!”  Yes, darn it.  I saw it and I also saw you doing absolutely nothing about it!

“Honey?  Definitely a mouse in the house.  Boots will be no help!”

“Oh well, we’ll have to trap it with one of those live traps, right Bootsie?”

A day later, the mouse was still making its rounds, getting bolder by the hour.  Next time I saw him he was dashing across the stacks of magazines, leaving the safety of the carrier space to search for food, I guess, while Boots and Austina watched fascinated.  Austina chases a laser dot as if it was the most important thing in her life, tirelessly fixing her dilated pupils on it, running after it, climbing walls, doing somersaults and skidding across the slick floor in pursuit.  Ditto with the feather on a string toy.  I would have thought a mouse would be the ultimate challenge, although it seemed to be more the ultimate visual entertainment, eliciting none of the expected chase and catch responses from these two feline waste-of-predator-space.  They both watched the mouse go forth and come back to its hiding place.  Boots found out that he could see the mouse through the screened sides of the carrier, squeezing up and down in gravity-defying feats, and he found this extremely amusing.  He proceeded to stick his head inside the carrier to watch closely, no doubt crossed-eyed and with great interest.  I planned to bring in the live traps ASAP, having lost all hope of ever seeing any of these guys fulfill their feline duties.

That night, we were both watching an old TV show on the computer, having wrestled our rightful place on the two IKEA chairs that are usually occupied by our four-legged tenants, when I heard a choked squawk next to me.  The sound was not unfamiliar, so I looked over to the side, expecting to see a cat about to hurl a particularly difficult hairball.  What I saw was our long-haired cat Baby with the mouse in his mouth.

“Honey!  Baby caught the mouse!!”

I had barely uttered these words when Claud lifted herself athletically from her chair, flew around the back of mine, and hurled herself towards Baby with a perfectly-executed tackle move you often only see during Monday Night Football.  Baby didn’t stand a chance.  Eyes wide open in sudden panic, his four legs scrambled in place like a cartoon character, scratching in vain on the slick floor, while Claudia grabbed him from behind.  The surprise made Baby squawk again, this time in astonishment and perhaps protest, which made him release the mouse.  The mouse didn’t lose any time and tried to escape too, but to no avail.  Claud was faster.  Dumping Baby, she reached with bare hands and scooped him off the floor.

“You’re going to get bitten!” I yelled, thinking of tetanus shots and a suite of mice-transmitted diseases.

“Nonsense,” she said.  She picked herself up from the floor, mouse in hand, walked outside in the dark towards the back of the house, and released the mouse back to his rightful environment.

We checked the cat carrier and the magazine stacks to see if there was a family to contend with, a nest or other signs of rodent homesteading, but everything was safe and clean.  We called it a night, with my half-hearted scolding about wild mice and sharp teeth, which went largely ignored.

The next morning, a pair of tiny mouse feet appeared on the kitchen floor, all that was left of either the dumb mouse that got back in after being released, or another mouse that may have been around enjoying the relatively short but exciting life in a house full of cats and a fearless woman.

In retrospect, I think that many house cats lose their instinctual abilities, honed for millennia by evolutionary forces, the survival of the fittest and the search for sustenance in a Nature Red in Tooth and Claw environment, because of their association with us.  The easy life has dulled these instincts, making some of them lazy, way too comfortable and more prone to intellectual activities (watching and wondering) than to let their instincts take over and fly off at the first sigh of potential prey.  That’s seems to be too messy for Boots and Austina (and Lilu, who seemed to have slept through the entire adventure), I’m guessing.  Baby proves again that these traits do not dissapear all the time.  He still carries the banner of wildness and the predator instinct in his blood.

Carlos