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January 07, 2008
Greaaaat
Tony in a field, originally uploaded by snoopoz.
That's a cat of mine, Tony. His real name is Antonio, but that's hard to say so everyone calls him Tony. In case you were wondering, I do not know if he is Italian.
Today in Lancaster it was 55 degrees, and Tony celebrated by going into the field next to my parents' house to scrounge up a meal. He was successful, because a few minutes later he was doing this:
Now, when I first came upon this scene I saw him emerging from the field carrying a mouse. He dropped it in front of me, and then started batting it around as it tried to run away. Needless to say, Tony was victorious, and he had soon left a pile of entrails at the doorstep.
Would you believe, one mouse was not enough? After I cleaned up the guts, I saw him coming back from the field with another mouse. This time he left the mouse's head on the doorstep. I feel pretty bad for those mice, but who am I to interfere with nature?
As my parents and I left for brunch before I drove back to Chicago, he was in the field again, looking for a THIRD mouse. That's when I took the top picture.
Tony looks a lot like my old cat, Sam. It's crazy, but ol' Sam died nearly five years ago. Now here is where things get disturbing. Whenever I go home, we do a lot of reminiscing. This was especially so this time around, because my mom bought a DVD recorder and has me copying all our old tapes, including an infamous video where Santa Claus came to visit in 1983. There were lots of videos of old pets, such as our first dog, Stanley, who was as gentle as he was giant. There were videos of Sam as a young kitten, and cats who are faded memories, like Robbie and Pickles. They both suffered ignoble deaths: Robbie tried to sneak under the automatic garage door and was crushed to death, while Pickles got run over by a car. Sam also got caught underneath the garage door, but he was so fat that he survived.
This led to a rather awkward conversation: my mom told me how when we first got the cats, the reason was for them to kill mice. We had just moved into this house in the country, with the aforementioned field. Mice sneaking into the house were a big problem, but they said, hey, let's get some cats, and they'll eat all the mice! We'll let them run around, kill bunches of mice, and oh yeah, we'll let little Timmy carry this animal around and treat it like his kid when he's not killing small fauna and eating out of the garbage can. I mean, I'm not stupid, I knew Sam was there to eat mice, but I liked to think it was a secondary purpose to other things like providing companionship and teaching responsibility. It's all good, though, I think Sam did all of his jobs quite well.
entry no. 1052
Posted at January 7, 2008 12:03 AM