Since Gretchen was little, by that I mean about two and half years ago, I found these little stuffed, furry mice in the local grocery/department store in our town. Back then they were sold individually for sixty-nine cents each. They were so like the real little gray mice that inhabit a kitchen cabinet full of dry stuff, beans or noodles and such. I particularly liked the in
dividual ones over the package of three or more mice in different colors, and it was so easy to pick up just one and throw it the shopping bag every time I went to the store. Gretchen got so excited when we came home with shopping bags, that she anxiously snooped through each one until she found her new mouse, flipped it out of the sack and headed off to play with it until she was tired or had lost it.
She was fun to watch and finally ended up with about four-dozen mice altogether, before the store quit selling them in the bulk bin and started carrying only the packaged mice. That's when Gretchen's fun ended. The excitement and the smell of a new rabbit fur mouse hidden somewhere amongst the groceries was something Gretchen expected; looked forward to. For a while I bought the packages of colored mice and took them out of their wrappings before I got home and threw them into the bag, but it was not the same. The smell of the plastic wrapped mice did not have whatever smell the other ones had that alerted her mousing instincts; even being born in human surroundings cats are supposedly born with a natural instinct to hunt furry critters. There may be some exceptions to this rule because I've had a few house-born cats that hadn't the foggiest notion of what to do with a live, furry critter scurrying across the kitchen floor.
It has taken a good year, at least, to find a substitute for the gray bit of fluff she so loved to hunt. Gretchen would get thoroughly annoyed with us once the mice stopped showing up in the shopping bags. She'd wait for moments of revenge, hide behind the door, or jump out of the closet and bite my ankles as I passed by. She only does that when she's expecting something of me that I can't deliver, or have forgotten to deliver.
From furry mice we went to treats. She loves the Temptations Salmon treats in the bright blue foil pack over any other kind. She learned to identify the color of the bag in the grocery sack by our making a huge deal over it hoping to take her mind of the nonexistent mice. We let her pull the foil package out of the sacks and play with it until she tried to bite her way into it
, then we'd open it and give her a snack.
Okay, I forgot sometimes, I mean she had a dozen bags already stockpiled and buying her another treat bag every time I went shopping was senseless. I tried other types of toys to give her reason to go through the sacks, but she never took to them. The plastic balls with the bells in them, they had her attention for about a minute, no surprise there anymore; the catnip toys, or balls filled with catnip, even catnip bubbles. No surprise there either.
Now I know it's entirely my fault. I've spoiled her rotten. Because of the furry mice hunts in her kitten days, she expects, no…demands something, to this day, of every shopping trip.
Well, I have found one thing that peaks her interest for about three minutes and that's the pink, practice golf balls. There's a dozen in a bag, and she now recognizes the bag and gets ready for me to open it and throw them one at a time, as soon as she spots them.
Sorry, I've drifted away from my reason for writing about the little furry mice made of gray rabbit fur in the first place. Back to the tale.
With about four-dozen mice accumulated, Gretchen played and played and played with the mice. When she'd finally lost the last of the lot under the fridge, between the sofa cushions, under the dresser, where a mouse could fall in a crack and hide, Gretchen would start her following me about routine, mewing in a distressed way. I learned to recognize this mew from that of treat, a spoonful of wet food, or dry. Once I realized what she was after, I, or rather, we—she and I—went on these mice hunts. I pulled out the furniture, looked under the bed, took the back scratcher to sweep them from under the sofa, the dresser or the fridge, all the while Gretchen crouched with frenzied anticipation for each mouse found and then placed in a pile in the middle of the living room floor for her to disperse at her leisure throughout the house again. This often took several days before all the mice had to be found again. Thank goodness!
The mouse find that I love the most is when we had a thirty-gallon aquarium. My husband and I often would turn off the TV at night before retiring for bed and just sit and enjoy the illuminated tank full of fish. I'm the one who cleaned the tank, so one would think I'd noticed it sooner than I did. Our Plecotomus, algae eater, usually took good care of the green furry things growing in the tank, but he didn't seem to be taking care of this dark gray fuzzy thing in the back corner by the filter tubes and it seemed to be growing. Next I noticed the flow of the filter wasn't the same. These, to me at least, were obvious signs of it needing cleaning. After a few more days of putting off the inevitable, I finally began to break down the tank for a good cleaning. The gray furry thing turned out to be one of Gretchen's brood. Somehow, she had managed to slip one through the small opening by the filter, into the tank. It had completely disintegrated by the time I had gotten to it. The now floating rabbit fur had clogged the filter and all that was left of it was this slimy, hairless piece of hide and the hard plastic form that made it look like a mouse in the first place.
Gretchen's down to about a dozen, well chewed, little gray mice now, and a few of the more expensive, longer furred critters that she really doesn't give a hoot about. We play our "you-throw-I-watch-you-pick-up" game with the few mice that are left only occasionally now (that's been replaced with the pink plastic golf balls). I think she's accepted the fact there probably aren't going to be anymore of them. I've sucked them up in the vacuum, she's dropped them in the waste baskets, a few she's dismantled entirely and a few she's chewed the tails off of, and of course, one went swimming. Often I'd find them under my pillow or buried in the blankets, or dropped in a shoe.
We still get that expectant look, and accompanying mew, upon entering the apartment with any grocery sack or shopping bag, but the excitement of the hunt is gone. I'm sure pet shops have furry gray mice piled in open bins like we once had here locally, but we live in a small community with only a few choices. I've thought of a dozen different ways to get them like that again, but I think it wouldn't work. I believe part of the excitement of finding the mouse, loose in the sack, had to be coupled with other smells that intrigued her and enticed her to play with them so vigorously…smells from the store, the clerk who touched them as she scanned and bagged them, smells from other people's hands perhaps, that had picked them up and put them back, long before I got to the store. Perhaps all those smells filled her imagination with a variety of things I'll never be aware of—because of her acute sense of smell.
One consolation: I'm sure in her little cat dreams, she's finding her favorite, little furry mice in grocery bag after grocery bag.
Tomorrow Gretchen will be flying her Cats on Tuesday Peace Banner for Wordless Wednesday, please stop by and have a look at it.
dividual ones over the package of three or more mice in different colors, and it was so easy to pick up just one and throw it the shopping bag every time I went to the store. Gretchen got so excited when we came home with shopping bags, that she anxiously snooped through each one until she found her new mouse, flipped it out of the sack and headed off to play with it until she was tired or had lost it.She was fun to watch and finally ended up with about four-dozen mice altogether, before the store quit selling them in the bulk bin and started carrying only the packaged mice. That's when Gretchen's fun ended. The excitement and the smell of a new rabbit fur mouse hidden somewhere amongst the groceries was something Gretchen expected; looked forward to. For a while I bought the packages of colored mice and took them out of their wrappings before I got home and threw them into the bag, but it was not the same. The smell of the plastic wrapped mice did not have whatever smell the other ones had that alerted her mousing instincts; even being born in human surroundings cats are supposedly born with a natural instinct to hunt furry critters. There may be some exceptions to this rule because I've had a few house-born cats that hadn't the foggiest notion of what to do with a live, furry critter scurrying across the kitchen floor.
It has taken a good year, at least, to find a substitute for the gray bit of fluff she so loved to hunt. Gretchen would get thoroughly annoyed with us once the mice stopped showing up in the shopping bags. She'd wait for moments of revenge, hide behind the door, or jump out of the closet and bite my ankles as I passed by. She only does that when she's expecting something of me that I can't deliver, or have forgotten to deliver.
From furry mice we went to treats. She loves the Temptations Salmon treats in the bright blue foil pack over any other kind. She learned to identify the color of the bag in the grocery sack by our making a huge deal over it hoping to take her mind of the nonexistent mice. We let her pull the foil package out of the sacks and play with it until she tried to bite her way into it
, then we'd open it and give her a snack.Okay, I forgot sometimes, I mean she had a dozen bags already stockpiled and buying her another treat bag every time I went shopping was senseless. I tried other types of toys to give her reason to go through the sacks, but she never took to them. The plastic balls with the bells in them, they had her attention for about a minute, no surprise there anymore; the catnip toys, or balls filled with catnip, even catnip bubbles. No surprise there either.
Now I know it's entirely my fault. I've spoiled her rotten. Because of the furry mice hunts in her kitten days, she expects, no…demands something, to this day, of every shopping trip.
Well, I have found one thing that peaks her interest for about three minutes and that's the pink, practice golf balls. There's a dozen in a bag, and she now recognizes the bag and gets ready for me to open it and throw them one at a time, as soon as she spots them.
Sorry, I've drifted away from my reason for writing about the little furry mice made of gray rabbit fur in the first place. Back to the tale.
With about four-dozen mice accumulated, Gretchen played and played and played with the mice. When she'd finally lost the last of the lot under the fridge, between the sofa cushions, under the dresser, where a mouse could fall in a crack and hide, Gretchen would start her following me about routine, mewing in a distressed way. I learned to recognize this mew from that of treat, a spoonful of wet food, or dry. Once I realized what she was after, I, or rather, we—she and I—went on these mice hunts. I pulled out the furniture, looked under the bed, took the back scratcher to sweep them from under the sofa, the dresser or the fridge, all the while Gretchen crouched with frenzied anticipation for each mouse found and then placed in a pile in the middle of the living room floor for her to disperse at her leisure throughout the house again. This often took several days before all the mice had to be found again. Thank goodness!
The mouse find that I love the most is when we had a thirty-gallon aquarium. My husband and I often would turn off the TV at night before retiring for bed and just sit and enjoy the illuminated tank full of fish. I'm the one who cleaned the tank, so one would think I'd noticed it sooner than I did. Our Plecotomus, algae eater, usually took good care of the green furry things growing in the tank, but he didn't seem to be taking care of this dark gray fuzzy thing in the back corner by the filter tubes and it seemed to be growing. Next I noticed the flow of the filter wasn't the same. These, to me at least, were obvious signs of it needing cleaning. After a few more days of putting off the inevitable, I finally began to break down the tank for a good cleaning. The gray furry thing turned out to be one of Gretchen's brood. Somehow, she had managed to slip one through the small opening by the filter, into the tank. It had completely disintegrated by the time I had gotten to it. The now floating rabbit fur had clogged the filter and all that was left of it was this slimy, hairless piece of hide and the hard plastic form that made it look like a mouse in the first place.
Gretchen's down to about a dozen, well chewed, little gray mice now, and a few of the more expensive, longer furred critters that she really doesn't give a hoot about. We play our "you-throw-I-watch-you-pick-up" game with the few mice that are left only occasionally now (that's been replaced with the pink plastic golf balls). I think she's accepted the fact there probably aren't going to be anymore of them. I've sucked them up in the vacuum, she's dropped them in the waste baskets, a few she's dismantled entirely and a few she's chewed the tails off of, and of course, one went swimming. Often I'd find them under my pillow or buried in the blankets, or dropped in a shoe.
We still get that expectant look, and accompanying mew, upon entering the apartment with any grocery sack or shopping bag, but the excitement of the hunt is gone. I'm sure pet shops have furry gray mice piled in open bins like we once had here locally, but we live in a small community with only a few choices. I've thought of a dozen different ways to get them like that again, but I think it wouldn't work. I believe part of the excitement of finding the mouse, loose in the sack, had to be coupled with other smells that intrigued her and enticed her to play with them so vigorously…smells from the store, the clerk who touched them as she scanned and bagged them, smells from other people's hands perhaps, that had picked them up and put them back, long before I got to the store. Perhaps all those smells filled her imagination with a variety of things I'll never be aware of—because of her acute sense of smell.
One consolation: I'm sure in her little cat dreams, she's finding her favorite, little furry mice in grocery bag after grocery bag.
Tomorrow Gretchen will be flying her Cats on Tuesday Peace Banner for Wordless Wednesday, please stop by and have a look at it.
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