Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-37553158-20191113030504/@comment-44123106-20191122025019

When I moved to my current house, I was - literally - living in a building site (not my house itself...) and as I also back onto to woods/fields, the cats were in seventh heaven. One of my boys was bringing back shrews, usually to eat. One or two were still alive, so I was up the ladder to get to the top of the 7' wall to reach ground level of the woods to release them. The best one was when I woke up one morning, having slept downstairs in the sun lounge to keep cool, to find the cats, not on top of me, but sitting in a semi-circle around the settee, staring. Having worked out what was up. I shut all of them (I had 7 at the time) into the kitchen, tipped up the settee and found a very lively screw! There were cat treats under the settee, so I think he'd probably been eating all night. I put the ladder up against the wall, picked the little fella up...whereupon he ran up the sleeve of my pjs. So there I was, on top of a 7' wall, trying to get a shrew off my shoulder and out of my pj top! Luckily, I had only one neighbour at that point, and they couldn't see me! I hope he found his way back to his family.

Around the same time, my smallest cat brought back a live "mouse", which I caught and released outside...only to realise as it ran away that it was actually a juvenile rat. Not sure if I could have actually hit it with a shovel...even if I had somewhere to put it while I got the shovel! Still, with my 7 cats and next door's 5, I doubt it hung around long!