My cat, Daisy, brought me live mice twice. The first one, she laid it at my feet and it immediately scampered into the utility room. There are lots of hiding places in there. Picture me grabbing a broom and hunting frantically for it with the family all thinking "Mama has lost her mind! I knew it would happen sooner or later!" I finally found it and disposed of it. The second time, the mouse was nearly dead. So I stomped it. Killed it. Dead as a doornail. She looked at me like, "Well! If that's all the appreciation I get, I won't bring you anymore!" And she didn't.
The mice the Ella brings are dead. Having seen her catch one in the house after we moved back to our Millinocket house, and another one outdoors, she kills them instantly, rather than playing with them like a lot of cats do. She goes at it as if it's a job, with total seriousness. Oddly, we had one live mouse in the house that she gave a pass to. I don't know what that was all about but she rubbed her head against the mouse as if to say, "This one is my friend." I'm thinking her friend didn't feel that way, and escaped the house at the first opportunity since I haven't seen it again.
That's four mice in two days. Ella is quite the little provider. Right now, she is staking out the woodpile and seems oblivious to the fact that I was talking to her from only a few feet away. Total concentration.
She does keep the rodent population down, which probably balances the number of the critters that might be attracted to my compost pile. It's been a few years since she's killed a bird so she's welcome to the mice and moles.
Cutie was outside today. I didn't see her, so I told Ella to go get Cutie. She goes outside and comes back in with Cutie about a minute later. I have a hard time believing that she really understands that I had asked her to go get Cutie, or that she would actually do that just because I asked her to. After all, she knows what I'm asking her to do when I say, "Ella, come here," but that doesn't mean she'll actually come. It's still pretty impressive though. Last night, Ella was lying in one of the cat beds when a siren sounded. She jumped up from her bed to go to the window to watch the fire truck go by. If she was outside, she would have been afraid of the siren. Inside, she viewed it as a sign of something worth looking at through the window.
I used to be able to keep Cutie company by talking to her while I worked. Now she's deaf, and she seems to like it if I talk into her fur. I suppose she can feel the vibrations. Without the sensation of hearing, her other sensations are more important. She wants me to look at her when I'm petting her, for example. One thing that I try to keep her from doing is getting in the habit of lying in the same bed and sleeping all day, so I make sure she has windows to look out, and I take her for walks. With arthritis, she doesn't walk around outdoors as much as she used to. When she goes out, she might make one foray to the back of the yard but mostly she lies under a tree or sits on the porch. So I carry her around the yard from time to time, so that she still gets the stimulus. She likes that and it seems to help. When she's getting more stimulus, she's more likely to engage with our other cat, Ella (age five), with whom she was just fighting as I was typing this, and to move from one place to another. We have three large cat trees in the house and I have padded beds in all of them.
Yeah. They chase each other around. The squirrel slapped Ella a week or so ago and yesterday, the squirrel chased her down the fire escape stairs. Ella rerouped a few minutes later and chased the squirrel into the tree.
Ella just brought a live mouse in the house and let it go. I don't think that's the way it's supposed to work.