Yet Another Cycling Forum
Random Musings => Miscellany => Where The Wild Things Are => Topic started by: Basil on 01 August, 2010, 02:45:25 am
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So, I'm sitting here reading about the wedding when I hear the cat-flap go and then lots of kitteh type games on the carpet behind me.
When I took a look I saw that he'd got a vole or mouse and it appeared to be alive.
I took the mouse (it was mouse) from him but was horrified to see six inches of gut hanging from him before he bit me causing me to drop him.
Should I have dispatched the poor thing there and then?
How?
Ceefer (Kitteh) continued to do the job, but it took much longer than I would have done.
I'm just weak. I can't kill a mortally wounded mouse. What do you do?
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A sharp garden spade brought down smartly on the rodents neck is my favourite method of putting broken cat toys out of their misery. Not that we get many these days as she mainly eats them.
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Took me a while to find this thread.
This morning, just as I was preparing to leave the house, Dafydd brought in a juvenile blackbird. Bugger, I didn't want to come home to feathers all round the house so I took it off him thinking I'd bung it in the bin. Even more bugger, it was alive and with no obvious signs of damage. But it just sat on the kitchen floor and didn't move.
I couldn't tell if this was due simply to shock or whether there was some serious internal damage. I had no idea of the best course of action.
I needed to get off to work sharpish so I just took it down the garden and popped it over the fence into a wild bit of a neighbour's garden, hoping it would recover its senses enough before Daf found it again.
I hate this stuff. :(
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Two rounds in the head. Double-tap.
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Small plastic bag = suffocation.
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I just used to hit them over the head with a hammer. Quick as possible.
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I reckon you did the right thing with that blackbird, Basil. The shock from being captured can be very debilitating for small
mammal animal* - and big ones I reckon! They take time to recover.
In one of the schools I teach in, a year or so ago a robin had found its way into the building. Everyone seemed to be getting into a right flap over it and the more distressed the bird became the less it seemed to try to evade capture. Eventually I just grabbed it and took it outside. It took a while before it had the gumption to realise that it did not need to prepare to meet its maker and it sat in a tree preening itself before making itself properly scarce.
*With acknowledgements to Hellymedic. I offer the Dozy Git defence.
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Mammal?
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Put it on the drive and reverse over it. :sick:
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A sharp garden spade brought down smartly on the rodents neck is my favourite method of putting broken cat toys out of their misery. Not that we get many these days as she mainly eats them.
Problem with that method is, is the cat clever enough to know what's going to happen and get out of the way... or not run IN the way... at least with the car method the cat is used to it and knows it's going to start moving.
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Our moggie brought home a weasel yesterday. Pcolbeck junior tried to rescue it but it had a broken leg and tried to kill him (viscous little buggers weasels). Before he could work out what he was going to do Hazel (the moggie) had recaptured the weasel and eaten it.
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I've only ever had to do this the once, fortunately. Our kitteh specialised in bringing home uninjured earthworms[1], which are a relatively harmless offering, as long as you notice them before they crawl off somewhere.
But the time she got at the baby blackbirds, I opted for the "grab cat, lock in house, return to garden and behead injured bird with an axe" approach. Mainly because there was a convenient axe and freshly felled tree stump to hand, rather than out of any sense of the dramatic, though I suspect this may still win the thread.
Oh, there was that time I cleaned up a friend's cat's vomit and found a live slug in the middle of it. The cat had little in the way of teeth, and the slug seemed to be slugging away unharmed, so it just got turfed out into the garden.
[1] She had a well-honed hunting technique that consisted of jumping up and down on the vegetable patch until they crawled to the surface.
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I thought you were morally obliged to eat them.
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The method I've employed, which is instant and relatively yuck-free, is to put said small, wounded beast into a bag and whack the bag as hard as possible against a convenient wall. No pussy-footing around (sorry), mind, it has to be a hefty blow. Works every time.
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Still-living rats get the .22 air pistol at point blank. Anything smaller and I rarely get anywhere near it before Charlie eats it. The last half-dozen rats have been clean kills with nary a mark on them, left neatly on the terrace for us.