I'll Show You My Pussy If You'll Show Me Yours
Posted: June 28th, 2006, 10:58 am
We have a mass murderer in our house.
We rescued Mingus from the animal shelter. It was his second adoption. He was a problem cat. They told us he was deaf and should be kept indoors.
Mingus is white enough to be in the KKK or the Aryan Brotherhood. He has pink ears and green eyes. He is far from deaf. He knows everything that is happening within a two block radius. Not only that, he has hands. They aren't paws, they are hands. The animal can open any cabinet in the house and can pick up small objects.
For the first few months we kept Mingus in the house. By that time I had observed that the cat was deafinitely not deaf. He could hear the smallest sounds. He didn't respond in the slightest way to human voice commands, but, hey, he's a cat. No savvy English. I found that the best way to train him was to give him a puff of the air that I use to clean out my keyboard. It's in a can. Now I don't even have to give him a puff to discourage some unwanted behavior, I just have to pick up the can. Mingus is a well behaved cat and a good citizen. He hasn't missed the box once since he's been here.
So, after observing that he was not disabled we let Mingus out of the house. Since then he has become the terror of the neighborhood. He is an expert predator. He's what they used to call a 'good mouser.' As a doctor of predation, Mingus doesn't limit his practice to mice. Actually he specializes in birds, but the odd squirrel or spider or bunny rabbit will do as well. Basically anything that moves.
You would think that a white cat would be at a predatory disadvantage. The prey can see him coming because he doesn't have the more common camouflage pattern and coloring. But in a strange way Mingus seems to become invisible to his victims. All they see is a streak of white before the lights go out.
As I write this Mingus is in the back yard torturing his latest victim. This morning I saw him capture a young chipmonk, but I think cute little thing escaped, or maybe Mingus just let him make it. But a few minutes later he got a sparrow. He tried to bring it in the back door. I'm sure he intended to leave it as a present for us but the poor bird was still alive and I didn't want the carcass in the house so I picked Mingus up and put him back outside with his mouth still full of bird.
The odd part is that he doesn't eat his prey. He eats cat food. He doesn't need to kill to eat. But some atavistic urge drives him on. Sometimes he makes two kills a day. About the same number of US soldiers in Iraq. But this is recreational killing. Mingus likes to play with his victims before he dispatches them.
The birds in the neighborhood have Mingus figured out. They know he's a terrorist and a killer bent on destroying their way of life. So, they have developed an impromptu Dept. of Homeland Security. They have Mingus under surveillance. When Mingus leaves the house, the two blackbirds that have him staked out begin to screech. They follow him around warning all the other species, the finches and the sparrows and the robins and the wrens. I think that their code name for him is Bin Laden.
