Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Predators
Here’s a quizlet for you: guess Will Smith’s total lifetime box office — the gross for all of his movies put together. See if you can nail the right order of magnitude.
Ferrets are cute, don’t you think?
And degus are cute, too:
We’ve had degus and ferrets for years now. The degus are getting old, and gradually our team of four became a team of three, which became a team of two. One of the remaining two had been losing weight and hair recently, a clear sign of the end. Two nights ago, the end came.
The ferrets were out and about when I noticed my dead degu. The ferrets had never shown much interest in the degus; their cage sits atop the degu cage, so it’s not like they haven’t smelled or seen them before. So I really didn’t think about it when I set the dead degu aside while cleaning up the ferret cage.
Bueller (that dork above) grabbed the degu by the neck and ran off with her. It took quite an effort to prise the corpse away from my ferret, but I eventually managed it. After that, Bueller ran around like the cock of the walk.
End of story, right? I’m afraid not. Last night soon after Jake let the ferrets out for their evening run, I heard squealing. I assumed the ferrets were playing rough so I went downstairs to have a look. Bueller had broken into the degu cage and had killed the last degu. I had to hold his head under the water faucet before he would release her. (Yes, yes, I shouldn’t waterboard my pets. But at the time, I had a faint hope she might be alive.)
After that, Bueller broke into the degu cage again, apparently seeing it as some sort of rodent vending machine. And he did the same thing again today. He worked his way in and waited. And waited. Eventually he got bored, but it took him the better part of half an hour.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. According to Wikipedia, there are places where ferrets are still used to hunt rabbits. The amazing thing is that our ferrets never tried this before.
Did Bueller do her a favor? She was old for a degu, but in good shape. Still, degus are gregarious creatures, and lone degus (I’m told) don’t do well. Maybe I’m just trying to find some sort of silver lining to what was essentially a very violent act.
This from the guy who used to keep boa constrictors. But those were feeder rats, not pets. And Babe isn’t bacon, he’s a sheep-pig.
Maybe I’ll just eat tofu. It’s hard to have sympathy for soy beans.
Quizlet answer: $2,520,925,686
That’s a lot of box office.
D.
Bueller sounds a tad cwazy.
Just a tad 🙂
Awww. Poor lil bugger. Eh. In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes”.
We keep little predators as pets. We shouldn’t be surprised when their predatory instincts come out. We were at the zoo the other day and one of the female tigers was up near the fence. She was testy because it was near feeding time. A young couple ahead of us poked a camera down near her and she growled and lunged at the fence. They leapt back and we crouched down to look at her. Even though she’s on the smallish side for a tiger, she’s probably still in the 300-350 lb range, plenty big enough that I would have no chance against her if the fence were to fail.
Where am I going with this? I don’t know. Predators predate. We keep little killers as pets, and they are happy as long as we keep the food coming and they don’t have to kill, which is merely work for them.
In other words, your degu died an entirely natural death. There is probably some cold form of cosmic karma restored as a result of this.
That is why we do allow Michael, our 19 year old cat, to go outside at night. We saw a coyote crossing the road just the other night, and we live in urban Nashville. He is definitely coyote bait.
Correction – “do NOT allow”.
I thought so, Lucie 🙂
We lost more cats to predators that way than I care to admit. Our current cats are indoor cats 100%.
That’s what I’ve always worried about with having birds and cats. Plus, the chihuahuas show an unhealthy interest in birds too.