further local findings confirm recent research conclusions

Earlier this year, a purportedly scholarly journal (how in hell would I know?) lit up a little buzz in the cat-people community after it published research findings of a recent study.  The researchers' work showed that domestic and stray/feral cats are responsible for killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 billion birds in the U.S. each year.  And something like 15 billion small mammals over the same stretch.  I don't think that this is quite what the not-so ancient Egyptians had in mind when they opened up the doors of their pyramids to let Fluffy in out of the desert cold all those years ago.

The study (which I, of course, haven't read) speaks to methodologies and numbers that I probably wouldn't even begin to understand.  But, I do wonder if those researchers somehow managed to forget to include our backyard in their sampling (as well as other residential properties within, say, a 150 foot radius). And if they did forget, then maybe they came up with some numbers which are way too low.  Our cats are over the top when it comes to this sort of a feline pastime.

I think that our cats, particularly Gray (or is it Grey?), who is slim and long and lithe and athletic, account for a few birds.  We feed the birds (sporadically) and I'll admit that we might be luring a few of them to untimely deaths.  We'll catch our girls eying the birds with interest every so often and Susan still gets stirred up when she remembers Gray and the goldfinch. 

The real carnage, though, seems to be on the small mammal populations in the neighborhood.  These two cats are hell on rodents.  They've dragged home chipmunks, a squirrel (they must have double-teamed that one) and moles in abundance. I think that it's Gray who rounds up most of the moles and leaves them strewn around the yard.  There was a particularly touching vignette out there a couple of weeks ago: one dead adult mole was stretched out under the tree while two juveniles lay at rest about 15 feet away, back by the garage.  I imagine the adult making a stand while the little ones made a break for it.  All for naught.

But, what really gets dragged home in numbers is rabbits. These two cats of ours are actual holy hell on rabbits.

Not so much Gray, maybe.  But Olive (so-named due to the similarity of her body shape to that of a black olive?), in this age of specialization, has specialized on rabbits.  Young rabbits, especially. Baby rabbits, even.  I described Gray earlier but Olive looks nothing like her sister.  In fact, they're so much unalike that I think we got sold a bill of goods when we were told we were adopting siblings from the same litter.

Gray probably tips the scale at  four or five pounds if she's just eaten.  On the other hand, Olive is large and round and, if she doesn't keep an eye on her figure, she's likely headed for 18-pound territory as a sedentary grownup.  If she makes it to 18 without being stepped on because she refuses to get out from underfoot. Where Gray is quick and agile, Olive is slow and hulking.  Where Gray can leap cat-scale buildings in single bounds, Olive is well aware of her vertical jump limitations and gives long consideration before trying even two and a half feet to an open window sill.

But this girl is a bona fide hellion when it comes to finding and dispatching baby rabbits.  She showed some early promise in this last year but she's blossomed this summer.  I think her count is approaching 10 and that only covers the ones I've found and buried along the borders or the backyard.  Stephen King's got nothin' on us.  Her tally likely soars when she manages to elude capture to stay out all night but will probably never be known.  I think she eats up some of the evidence out of sheer boredom.  I say boredom cuz it ain't hunger.  One look at her dispels any thought that she's missed any meals over the past few months.

Her favorite hunting ground is the backyard two doors west down Laurel.  There's a tool shed in that back yard which is set up on some dimension lumber footings and the subbasement  has been appropriated by local rabbits as a convenient bunny hutch and hookup motel.  But whoever moved in there first didn't do any background checks or they'd have learned about the undesirable neighbor two doors east up Laurel.  I've caught Olive leisurely stretched out near the main entrance to her local bunny smorgasbord, just waiting to snap up some of the passing traffic. The homeowner up the street recently confirmed, by actual sighting, my picture of Olive muscling her way past whatever security is posted at the door and coming back out after choosing her latest pal for a playdate.

Olive usually drags the poor saps back to our place to show them off or to try to sneak them into the house.  I've been good about prying the casualties out of her clutches before she can get in but I was bound to miss one sooner or later.  That sooner or later came the other night when Miz Susan went out onto the back deck after dusk to do whatever it is she does out on the back deck after dusk (don't tell her mother, as if her mother doesn't already suspect).  She claims she went out to turn off the water,  OK, fine.

While she was "turning off the water", Olive made her move.  She slipped unseen onto the house with a mouthful of still-warm baby bunny and dashed all the way up to the third floor to show it off to me.  I was doing whatever it is up do up on the third floor (usually folding t-shirts) when Olive and friend made their appearance.  I gently chided her for this breach of house etiquette in a calm and measured tone using words something along the lines of, "What in the good-god-peewallin-fuck made you think that it was a good idea to bring that goddamn thing up here for?".  That stopped her in her tracks and she dropped the still warm, though cooling, baby bunny on the floor and lay down to await further developments.

She may have been willing to await further developments but I had other problems.  Namely Gray, who had been sprawled out on the bed disrupting the t-shirt folding process to the best of her ability short of getting thrown off onto the floor.  Gray was intrigued.  This was something new and, by God, if there were going to be further developments, then she was going to be a part of them.  Nice try.

I scooped up both cats and shooed them down the steps and then hustled down to the kitchen for a plastic bag and a paper towel.  Stopping only to commend Susan, still out on the back deck, for having successfully gotten Olive into the house at this late hour but had she really wanted to let Olive bring a friend in for a sleepover with no prior permission, I headed back upstairs with plastic bag and paper towel in hand.  The thought crossed my mind that maybe the baby bunny hadn't really been all dead but that maybe it had been just mostly dead or playing dead and that it had crawled off into a nice cozy corner to recuperate.

But no,  there it still was in a little still warm though cooling baby bunny heap on the floor to be scooped up with the paper towel and dumped into the plastic bag and get left at the foot of the steps of the back deck to be unceremoniously dumped in the trash with the old kitty litter the next day.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that.  It took Miz Susan the better part of a day to stop with her "yucks" and "i-i-ishes" and "grosses".

Cat videos are all the rage on YouTube these days.  Katie, one of Liz's and Alison's friends from way back, rode a cat video film festival to help launch her presence on the local visual arts scene.  We've come a long way from Morris's plugs for 9 Lives.  I wasn't able to get video footage of this recent little drama but I doubt that, even if I had, it would have been as well received as Grumpy Cat or images of cats falling off of the backs of couches while chasing laser pointer beams on the wall.  We love our cats dearly.  They've brought tons of pleasure into our previously barren and meaningless lives.  And Miz Susan and I like to tell each other that they love us, too.  They've just got some strange ideas of how to show it sometimes.