Year Of The Cat

Animal behaviorists say that when cats bring mice, birds or whatever they capture into your home, it is meant as a compliment.

After all, we give them dried cat food, so they must think things are tough and want to help out.

Our cats have always seen fit to bring us gifts. Recently it has been a bevy of shrews, both dead and alive. April is smack dab in the middle of the breeding season for these shirt-tail cousins to moles, so the availability is apparently pretty good.

It would almost be okay if they always left the offerings where we can find them. At least then they could get a decent burial (okay, a toss out in the empty field). Unfortunately they end up under the sofa or the bed, which means they typically are not seen before they are smelled. Trust me, it's not what you want to smell first thing in the morning when you're looking for the coffee in the pantry.

Shrews are new to our list of feline offerings. In Oregon, we were graced with gophers, mice and many a bird. And, just once, a koi.

That's right. A koi.

We found it on the laundry room floor, proudly displayed by Spot, a black and white tabby. The koi was about half a big as she was. What made it all the more impressive was she had taken it from a neighbor's koi pond which was down the block and across the street. How she managed to bring it all the way home, fully intact, was beyond me.

Spot was the cat who never met a person she didn’t like and could always be counted on warming a lap, even when you didn’t want her to. We picked her out of a batch of kittens at a shelter, the only one with a tail that was crooked at the end; we thought she was the runt of the litter, not enough room in the womb for her siblings and her tail. Many years later, I showed a picture of Spot to a colleague of mine; she had taken a kitten with a crooked tail from a litter of all crooked tail cats at the same shelter sometime before Spot picked us out.

We had to put Spot down last year as her kidneys had failed. While other cats have lived in our household, none spend as much time on a lap getting pets as Spot did. You could always count on Spot to spend the day with you in bed when you were sick. For me, that was always especially comforting.

When our present cats bring in small tokens for us, I typically thank them and ask if they have ever heard of Spot and the koi. As they say, give a cat a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a cat to fish and he will depopulate your neighbor's very expensive koi pond.