Percy's First Mouse

Ever since I got back from my mission in 1987 I have been allergic to cats, even though I love them. But we have a problem. The field mice from the backyard keep invading the house. A few years back when some of them took up residence inside one of the kitchen walls and I had to rip out the wall when they died because they stunk so much, I put out poison. I felt guilty doing it, and I worried about the dogs or, heaven forbid, someone's child finding the poison, but now I have puppies, dogs and chickens, and I babysit nieces and nephews frequently, so I really don't want poison anywhere around my house. Heck, I don't even use toxic cleaning supplies! To me, cats were the only answer to get rid of the mice.

So in September of this year I got our friend Ardie to cure me of the cat allergy using EFT (see http://www.emofree.com/ to find out more) and voila! We started looking for cats! We got Percy from the people who rent my Aunt Beth's apartment. They found him as a stray, but already had two cats, so they couldn't keep him. Aunt Beth told me about him when she was giving us a ride home from our Workman Family Reunion in St. George in September, so a week or so later we went over to see him on a Sunday afternoon. He got interrupted as he was playing with their other two cats, so he didn't seem terribly friendly, just dang cute, but after I held him for a couple of minutes, I looked over at Dave and asked him what he thought, and he just emphatically nodded his head yes. It was love at first sight. He's such a confident, feisty little guy. And very friendly, when he wants to be. The people who found him told us he could already beat their cats in a fight, even though he was less than half the size of either cat.

We got him home and started looking through name databases on the web, and Dave made a list of the possibilities. After a few days of looking, Percival was the one that stuck out to me, and Dave said ok, so that's his name: Sir Percival. We call him Percy for short.

When I took Percy to the vet for his first exam and shots, they told me he was about 4 months old. Then they gave him tests for all the horrible diseases that strays in our area commonly get, but he got a clean bill of health. They checked him for a microchip, and he didn't have one, so I got him microchipped under our names, and he was officially ours! Yay!

I think everybody should get pets in pairs, so they have each other to play with. That meant getting one more cat. At first Dave wasn't so hot on the idea, but I talked him into it and about a week later we adopted one more cat, a Siamese, from some friends of my sister Laura. They were going to move to Singapore, and couldn't take him with them. He was a year and a half old, his name is Nimitz, after a cat in one of their favorite books, and he's gorgeous. He got his shots updated and got a microchip as well, and then we were the proud owners of two cats!

When we brought them home we were camped out on a mattress in the basement, crammed into the smallest bedroom ever constructed. (It has now been reborn as the study, where I am typing this.) The room is connected to a bathroom, so we put the litterbox in the bathroom and kept both cats in there for a month or so, until we felt they were adjusted enough to let them out into the main basement areas. Then I spent three incredibly boring days sitting around with each of our dogs (we had three large dogs at the time because Becky's dog Mickey was staying with us while she was in Germany) one at a time, on leashes, jerking their leashes and saying "no" whenever they went after Percy or Nimitz, until they learned not to pay attention to the cats. In retrospect it was totally worth three looooooooong days, because now the dogs and cats all get along fine, but at the time I was seriously considering gnawing off my own arm, just for entertainment.

We never saw any mice until I found Nimitz in the bathroom chasing one, the day before I took these photos of Percy with another mouse. I didn't get any photos of Nimitz with the mouse, because I had to leave the room. It made me feel kind of sick. The mouse in these photos was already dead by the time I noticed it, but Percy was still having a great time playing with it. The next day I watched Percy kill a mouse in a window well, and in the morning we found a dead mouse left outside our bedroom door as a present. So between the two cats, they have killed at least 4 mice so far, without us ever having seen a live one except with a cat in hot pursuit. Go cats! (I do like mice, and I feel sorry for them getting killed, but I draw the line at letting them live in my house.)