Tinka Gets Her Groove Back

[akirlu]

Moles have such lovely fur. Very dense-looking, velvetty stuff. And their digger claws are fascinatingly translucent -- they're really almost pretty. And when you have a dead mole on your back porch, you can observe in in very fine detail, as you delicately pick it up with an inverted plastic bag to dispose of it. (Is there an optimum environmentally-sound and public-health-approved way to dispose of a mole, I wonder? Yard waste, recycling, trash, or toilet? Probably not recycling.)

So after a long interregnum, Tinka has her game on again. My first clue was coming back to find a small deceased rat on the doormat after I had taken Sarah out for her walk. I'm pretty sure the rat was not there when we left the house, because the screen door didn't quite clear the corpse. I had to fish a spare dog-walk bag out of my pocket to dispense with the thing before I could even take Sarah into the house. Happily, she was not overly curious.

When we got back from our LA visit, the sitter wanted to let us know that there was a dead rat in the lidded can where we usually segregate the filled dog bags. "Yeah, sorry about that," I said. "It was the easiest place to ditch it," I said. "No, I mean I found a dead rat and dropped it in there," she said. Oh.

Then there was the one we found decomposing in the middle of the front lawn, and then the sad little pile of feathers that appeared on the back porch over the weekend -- Tinka somewhat offsets her penchant for birds by actually eating them -- and today the mole. I'm not sure she's despatching local fauna at the rate of one per week, but it's close to that. Definitely got game. If she can only inspire Spike and Lefty to make an effort, the squirrels may live in fear yet.

Comments

[lintninja.livejournal.com]

I had a cat named Avatar who was an amazing hunter. She would somehow leave us rats and mice that had been so neatly evicerated that the only thing that was on the doorstep was a nose and whiskers attached to all the internal organs. It was really spectacualarly disgusting. She also used to throw mice at the screen door or at you if you happened to be outside when she had come home with a kill.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Apparently you have a serial killer in your midst, yes. Considering that most of the victims are commonly considered to be vermin, you might not want to discourage this. It would probably be especially difficult to teach a cat that rats & moles are legitimate prey, but birds are not. They tend to understand "prey" very well, but to have great difficulty with "legitimate".

Probably the most ecologically-admirable way of disposing of the corpses would be to eat them, but if that is unappealing or impractical, a fine way would be to dig a deep hole in the back yard and bury them. (With "deep" being defined as "covered sufficiently that other varmints are not likely to disinter them".) Covering with a foot or so of soil is usually adequate unless you have a dog that enjoys digging. Personally, I've found that a post-hole-digger is the best tool for this -- except when the substrate is rocky, in which case I'd deprive the trees of their nourishment and go for the trash/garbage commercial pick-up container.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess we could regard the offerings as supplemental protein. I'm pretty sure that's how they are intended. And yet...

I will give some thought to burying Tinka's prizes. My main concern with that is winding up with a yard full of post holes.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Concern about a yard full of post holes is reasonable, but there'd be only one active at any given time, and mine (used for bones & not-excellent-for-compost material, but nothing greasy) will take several weeks worth of stuff, alternated with enough soil to avert flies and smells... depending on how deep I feel like digging it. They help improve water penetration, drainage, and soil down where tree roots are. In my yard at least, all surface traces disappear within a few months, and early-on the slight mound of disturbed soil delights the Neighborhood Cats. What some Archaeologist might make of it, a thousand or so years from now, is another matter -- but I sometimes deliberately toss in a coin (low-denomination, of course) or ceramic or glass trinket, Just In Case....

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

My cats have all been indoor cats, but when we first moved here, we had a cat named Tiger. Arlington County couldn't hire Mother as a full-time teacher because they would have had to pay her too much, so she ended up working long subs (teachers asked for her when scheduling surgery or babies) and making more money than if they'd hired her as a master teacher. (No benefits, but we had Dad's Navy benefits.) On the days she decided not to work, she made chicken livers for lunch because she was the only one in the family who liked them. She shared them with Tiger who started bringing her the heads and livers of birds. She'd thank him and then put them in the garbage when he wasn't looking.

Then we were stationed in Virginia Beach and we bought a house in a development that was a bird sanctuary and Tiger never caught another bird.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Tiger must have been remarkably perceptive.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we wondered about that, but it could have been the mockingbirds that dive-bombed him whenever he was outdoors.