Managing Mammals

Posted on Mon 12 July 2010 by alex in general

I'm writing this post the Sunday house break-in attempt. However much as I'd like to vent and praise I thought I'd stick with some positive commentary on the weekend and save the rest for another post.

This weekend has involved a variety of mammals and their interactions with their human masters/slaves/overlords*. We started on Friday when an old friend of Fliss' came over to stay with his lovely half-whippet dog Mina. Mina is very friendly and approachable but also fairly excitable which explains why our two cats didn't really hang around for too long to get to know her. They quickly came to the decision that the wilds at the back of the house were more preferable than sharing with an unknown dog. We did shut the door between kitchen and living room to create a dog-free refuge for the cats but they seemed reluctant to trust in our security arrangements, even scarpering at high speed when I came into the kitchen to do some washing up.

I found another mammal in our garden during the evening. A hedgehog came wandering across my path before rushing into the perceived shelter of the garage. Rather than rush it out we decided to leave the garage open as late as possible. However the hedgehog persisted in hiding itself away until I eventually gave up and locked it in for the night.

Once Mina left with Thom late on Saturday it took a degree of coaxing to convince the cats that it was safe to approach the house again. I ended up taking a food bowl outside and progressively moving it closer to the house. I'm happy to report the cats are now back to fully the facilities offered by our humble abode.

That left us on Sunday evening with our hedgehog visitor having endured two overnight stays in the garage and showing no sign of leaving via the open doors during the day/evening. I ended up picking it up with some suitable gardening gloves, watching it cutely go into defencive ball position before laying down on the garden border and watching it waddle into the bushes, hopefully hungry to tackle the slugs in the garden.


* delete as appropriate