Wild Thing

It was about a year ago now that I sneaked up behind my cat Benny and stuffed him into a cat-carrier box, for a long 3-hour ride to the Poconos. At the time I was about to start a 6-month cruise ship job, and I didn’t want to leave Benny alone in my Long Island house for all that time. I’d “abandoned” him before, for other cruise jobs, and it seemed to me he was increasingly resenting it. Although I could arrange for people to come and feed him, I now felt that he needed to “live with” someone. “Human companionship needs“, so to speak.

As it eventually turned out, I unloaded that house, finished the ship gig in May, and have now joined Benny and my sister’s family out in the Poconos. He’s been here almost a year now, and after a few months of sulking in the basement, he wound up adjusting to things, returning to his “outdoor cat” style, with a new and deadly twist.

Sometime last autumn, shortly after I went out to sea, dead mice started turning up in the basement. It turned out that the oncoming winter was forcing mice indoors, and into the paws of a suddenly murderous cat. After a while the outside mice seemingly realized that Theresa & Gerry’s basement had become dangerous, and went elsewhere for shelter. Benny had de-moused the basement.

By springtime Benny had expanded his turf -- he became completely comfortable outdoors, and claimed this acre of woods as his own. Now, at the end of Summer 2010, he is officially Killer Cat, with a regular routine of leaving dead mice, moles, and even small rabbits all over the property, sometimes dropping the critters on the back deck as some perverse “gift” to the human occupants.

He isn’t eating this prey. He just leaves them lying all over. He‘s perfectly well-fed with Meow Mix, Friskies and whatnot, so this rodent-killing seems to be an amusement, an exercise in sadism. I say sadism because we’ve seen Benny toying with these little fellas before killing them, batting them around like tennis balls.

He wasn’t like this back at my house on Long Island. He was an outdoor cat certainly, but in 8 years only once did I ever see him like this, beating up on a soon-to-be-deceased bird. But this Poconos area is much more wild, and seems to have completely loosed Benny’s jungle instinct.

And now vultures are frequent visitors to this property, circling high above or perching themselves on a dead tree, enjoying the new Benny Era, waiting for the right moment to pounce on one of his victims -- which, revoltingly, is a few days AFTER the kill. It‘s a perverse yet symbiotic system -- Theresa & Gerry get a free fumigation, the vultures have their sicko feast, Benny indulges his new vice, I get something to write about.

I used to think that human beings were the only creatures who killed for non-food reasons. That certainly seems untrue now, with Benny terrorizing the local rodents, with all the moral reservation of Jack the Ripper. No bad consequences either -- in fact I’m going downstairs to put some Meow Mix in Benny‘s bowl right now, and I’ll probably scratch his ears too.