Ohhh Rats!

The other night I was on the phone with one of my best friends who had just had a baby. She was telling me her harrowing story of a home birth that resulted in an emergency C-section, and at one of the most climatic moments I heard a strange noise coming from our dining room. I went to check it out, flicked on the light and there I found Mazy, our persnickety tabby, crouched over a dead rat chewing off its head.

With Chef at work, I was on my own to deal with the situation. I interrupted my friend to tell her my shocking discovery and she said "Eww. Do you want me to let you go?" Without hesitation I replied, "No, I am going to just let her do her thing and deal with it later." With that I turned around, flipped off the light and left her to her gnaw. Granted, I could have shooed her away only to have to deal with the remains myself, but knowing Mazy I knew she would handle them herself in her own way.

Mazy and I have a long history of her bringing game into the house...birds, rats, moles, the whole gamut, and me having to deal with the aftermath. She is a well fed cat, and like many people, she hunts for sport and then indulges in her prize. She always chews the head off, leaves two organs which I think are the liver and stomach, and then takes the rest of the carcass back outside through the cat door.

When you live with a predator, there is little to be done about its natural instincts. You can't exactly punish a cat for being itself. Mazy is an indoor/outdoor animal and sometimes she forgets the distinctive difference between the those two worlds.

Sure enough, I returned to our dining room half an hour later and the rat and the cat were gone, and there were two organs laying on the sea grass rug. I picked them up and threw them out. I decided to wait until Chef got home before figuring out how to get the rat blood off the sea grass.

You can not scrub sea grass with soap and water the way you can other rugs. In fact, you can't even spill water on sea grass without having to clean it up by pouring starch on it and vacuuming the moisture out of it. I am all about natural fiber textiles, but do not recommend sea grass to anyone who has children or pets, or an f$%@&ing life for that matter.

About an hour later I heard Mazy vomiting in our living room. My first thought, You have to be kidding me. She puked up pink tinted bile, and at that point I lost it. I called her a disgusting animal and threw her out of the house, shut off all the lights, and locked myself in the bedroom for the rest of the evening. I was done.

There are many ecological benefits of living with pets, but primal dining experiences are not one of them.