HUNTER COON STRIKES AGAIN

First off, you've probably noticed that my blog looks a little different. I've made the switch over to Blogger beta, and I wanted to try out the new customizable layout stuff. Well I picked out a new template and started playing around before I realized that they don't have the "edit HTML" option quite ready yet. So until Blogger gets that up and running, I won't have my blog banner or all my nifty things I had in the sidebar. Hopefully they get it out soon so I can have all my stuff back on that took me forever and a day to learn how to do! :)

Now, on to our regularly scheduled broadcast...

My little hunter Coon has stuck again. Last night he killed a bat. This morning when I got up I found a blood trail on the kitchen floor, then I found a piece of bloody bat carcass on IJ's bottom bunk (yep, IJ's in a big boy bed now-R built the boys a bunk bed).

Coon is my Maine Coon cat (I know, his name is so original, but it was my dad's idea...). I never considered him to be much of a hunter. He's this big stocky male cat with tons of fur, but his meow is teeny tiny. And usually he's a big chicken: all R has to do is say "Psst psst" and he takes off running. I've always thought that Coon was a dog reincarnated as a cat; he likes to have his belly rubbed, he'll follow me around the house like a little puppy, and he'll run up to the door meowing when I walk in. There's no "cat independence" there.

But my opinion of Coon as "not a hunter" changed around the beginning of my pregnancy with IJ. I had had a pet mouse that died, and to make me feel better, R brought me two new mice from the pet store. Except, you guessed it, he brought me a male and a female instead of two of the same sex. It wasn't long before they multiplied. And multiplied again. I had a freaking mouse colony. So eventually I had the male mice in one cage and the female ones in another, and I was either going to take them to the pet store to be sold, or find someone with a pet snake. (They all ended up going to one of auntie's friends that has a bunch of snakes, so they all became food. I was sooo done with mice. I haven't had a pet mouse since then. And I probably won't for a while.)

It came time for R, C and I to go on a trip to St. Louis, so I left my colony in care of nana and papa. We were stopped in a restaurant on our way home when we got a phone call. Nana and papa had come in to feed the animals, and had discovered the scene of a homicide. Many homicides. And these mice weren't just killed: they were ripped apart. Blood and mouse parts were strewn all across the living room. My other cat, Prissy, was still alive then and would occasionally catch a mouse, but she would just kill it and play with it for a while and then leave it somewhere where I would step on it. Coon was the mouse murderer.

After we came home I witnessed his hunting skills first hand. When Coon got into one of the mouse cages, he didn't kill all the mice before some had a chance to hide. Coon came walking out of the kitchen one day with a mouse in his mouth, but we must have scared him because he dropped it. And it wasn't dead yet. So R killed it with a broom. Lovely. And a few mornings I awoke to bloody mouse carcass on the floor. (Prissy got into the action, too; she killed a mouse one night and left the body outside our bedroom door, then meowed at us until we got up to receive our "gift".)

Sweet chicken cat Coon has a murderous side. And this morning's bloody bat chunk just proved it some more. After I removed the body from IJ's bed, Coon jumped up there and started smelling around for it. When he couldn't find it, he gave me a look that seemed to say "Um, I wasn't done tearing that apart yet."

I'm just hoping he's up to date on all his rabies shots. And that we don't have "bats in our belfry". This is the 4th bat we've had in our house in the past few weeks. I'm really scared to go and open up the attic...