Eat or be eaten. The law of the jungle. These aphorisms don’t generally have much practical application in the life of the average urban dweller. Well, if you don’t count office warfare.
In the country, it’s a little different, at least in Canada.
Every time a loose dog was found running down our county road, we would be the first place the kind-hearted Good Samaritan would come to make inquiries. We understood.
It was reasonable to guess that a runaway dog was running away from the nearest kennel. It was annoying to us nonetheless, as we never had a dog run away. Well, once, sort of. (That story is told in my memoir, Potholes on the Road Less Traveled).
We did occasionally have dogs that got loose. A lead would break, a gap between the fence and the ground would appear when the ground thawed in the spring and an enterprising Beagle or Jack Russell Terrier would see an opportunity for a little adventure, and take it.
But our dogs always ran back to us. They liked us. They had fun at our place. In fact, one of our neighbour’s dogs, who had boarded with us exactly once, would take every opportunity to escape from her house up the hill and come running down to us, in hopes of joining the good times.
So when I answered a knock on the door one fine day, I was not all that surprised that the lady standing there inquired about lost dogs.
I confess though that I was somewhat taken aback to be asked if we had lost a whole pack of German Shepherd puppies.
What? We had occasionally ended up boarding multiple German Shepherds belonging to different owners at the same time.
Yes, German Shepherds are smart. But it beggared belief that they would all have taken off together in some sort of concerted escape conspiracy. This was Oak Meadows Pet Resort after all, not a prisoner of war camp from The Great Escape.
The lady explained that she had seen six German Shepherds on the road. They looked young; she thought perhaps eight months or so. She had been afraid to get out of the car, since they had swarmed around, barking furiously, when she stopped. I asked if they had collars, but she said she really hadn’t been close enough to see. She added that as she drove away they had run off down a nearby side road.
Both intrigued and concerned, I told the lady I would drive down there and see if I could figure out who they belonged to. She decided to come with me.
I pulled onto the side road and sure enough, there were six beautiful juvenile German Shepherds racing around. I stopped the car and rolled my window down so we could have a chat. Yes, they were barking, but their body language told me they weren’t hostile. The ears were up, and the tails were wagging. There was no growling, no fixed stares, no stiff legs or raised hackles or snarls. I decided to open my door a crack and see what would happen.
The dogs in front jumped back a bit. I stuck out my leg. Encouraged by the fact that no one offered to chew it off, I got out of the car.
This scary manifestation spooked the vicious pack of predators so much that they took off en masse across the fields, heading in the direction of a distant farm.
I got back in the car and followed them. They disappeared behind the barn belonging to the farm. I pulled into the driveway, the Good Samaritan still behind me, meaning to ask the farmer if he had lost six dogs. As I did so, two adult German Shepherds came bounding out, clearly ready to protect their family and property. The young dogs swarmed behind. Obviously I had the right place.
I was about to back out, when the farmer hove into sight. He was smiling, so I got out of the car, hoping to satisfy my curiosity. The Good Samaritan, emboldened that I hadn’t been eaten, joined me. I explained our presence, and complimented the farmer on his dogs.
He either heard the slight question in my voice, or understood that having eight dogs is not typical, even in the country, because he told us the backstory to him having a whole pack of dogs.
In addition to his crop operations, this guy had sheep. His flock was plagued by our local pack of coyotes coming down in the night and attempting to pick up dinner in his paddocks.
He had originally owned just one male German Shepherd, called Rowdy. Sometimes Rowdy was able to protect the whole flock, and sometimes the coyotes managed to finesse him and grab a sheep. There matters had rested until the previous year.
The coyote pack was growing, no doubt because of the terrific levels of protein a lamb or ewe could provide. One night, the farmer was roused by more than the normal noise and commotion when the copotes paid a visit. He could hear his dog yelping, and the coyotes yipping. He grabbed his pants and his rifle and arrived on the scene just in time to see Rowdy in full flight, pursued by the entire pack of coyotes. He sent a few shots after them, but was too far away to do any good. He jumped in his pickup and attempted to chase them down, but they went over the fields into woods where he couldn’t follow.
He kept searching for his dog all that night and the next day, but couldn’t find a trace. Over the next days, he put up flyers and continued to search. When he had just about given up hope, he got a call (surprise – from another dog kennel), to ask if he owned a German Shepherd dog. Another Good Samaritan had found Rowdy wandering and had (naturally) checked with the closest kennel to see if he had escaped from there. This kennel was a good 20 kilometres away.
The farmer, looking away in embarrassment,told us that he had actually cried when he got the call. We, his enthralled audience, made sympathetic noises.
Determined that in future, the coyotes were not going to get either his dog or his sheep, the farmer acquired a female dog and bred a litter of puppies. These were the youngsters who had uncharacteristically taken it into their heads to go out running around the countryside.
Unsurprisingly, since the puppies had gotten old enough to join their parents in patrolling the farm, there had been no further trouble from the coyotes.
Create a pack of predators to defeat a pack of predators. Clever.
We experienced many less dramatic examples of the predator/prey balance, further down the food chain. Our neighbour’s cat, for example, used to hunt snakes and bring them into the house. They weren’t always dead either.
When we moved to the country, homeless cats kept showing up. We ended up, at our peak, owning ten cats. A few more and we would have been firmly ensconced in the Crazy Cat Lady section.
Then a fisher was reported in our area.
We actually saw him coming out of the woods at the end of our driveway for a few minutes.
Fishers are mammals of the same family as weasels and martens. Fishers are solo hunters and they are very good at what they do. They prey on other small mammals. Fun fact: fishers are the only predatory species that will kill and eat porcupines.
They are notorious for feasting on the family pets.
Fishers will move on after they have destroyed all the small animals in a given area. After this fisher’s visit, we had no more feral cats on our doorstep for about two years.
When we lived in the city, our cats never went outside (with one major exception brought about by superior force and intellect). Once we acquired ten cats though, it was another story.
Having lived outside, they expected to spend part of their time outdoors. And really, life with ten cats was going to go a whole lot more smoothly if they could spread themselves out over our hundred acres, and not just our house.
So our cats were allowed to roam around outside (although we kept them in for weeks when we heard there was about the fisher). It worked just fine. Except for their own predator instincts.
One cold winter’s night, a pair of cats showed up on our porch. One was a grey and white tabby. The other, larger one was unmistakably male. He had a long coat of wildly crazy grey and white fur. I dubbed the pair of them Hermione and Hagrid. They were both pretty skittish, but would eat the food we left out for them, once we hid around the corner.
After a few weeks, on a brutally cold, blustery February evening, I ventured to sit down on a chair on the porch. Hermione let me touch her, but Hagrid ran away. After a few minutes, I sat back in the chair and Hermione jumped into my lap. I put her under my coat and she started to purr. Without thinking further, I grabbed her firmly and took her in the house.
Hagrid never returned. That spring, we found his body on the road. He had been hit by a car and killed not too far from our place. The fate of cats born to the wild. Hagrid ran into the night and died. Hermione came in and lived to be twelve years old.
Queen of The Jungle Hermione never lost her predatory urges.
It was bad enough when our cats hunted and killed birds, but Hermione’s particular fetish was chipmunks.
She would hunt Chip and Dale with a sort of Max Max, post-apocalyptic fervour, then rip their heads off and leave them on the porch as presents. I suggested that she was collecting trophies to make a necklace. The General didn’t find this attempt to lighten his existential despair with a bit of black humour in the least bit consoling. He was appalled every time it happened.
See, The General, for all his grumpy demeanour, was actually tremendously soft-hearted, at least when it came to anything with fur or feathers. When we arrived in the country, the house was infested with mice. The General bought a live trap. The mouse would enter the trap. He would transport it and its contents down to the stable, where he would release the little disease carrier.
This of course was totally ineffectual, as the mice survived to breed and re-infest the house.
Once I actually saw the mouse The General released, immediately turn around and scamper back up the path to the house. He beat The General there.
You’d think with the number of cats we had (never less than four) that we would not have had a mouse problem. You would be wrong.
All but one of them decided mice were cool things to play with. But kill them? No, birds and chipmunks, sure. They hunted mice outside. They hunted mice outside in packs even.
But inside? This was beyond their brief. The only one who tried was our orange cat, Oscar, but his efforts were invariably foiled by the others.
They would see him crouching patiently by a mousehole waiting to pounce on any rodent unwise enough to show a whisker outside the entrance. Another cat would stroll up,, his attention caught by Oscar’s focused intensity. In cat language she would ask “Hey? Whatcha doin’? Is there something in there? Can I play?”
Oscar would snarl at her to go away, which she would take as an invitation to play. On the rare occasions when a mouse made a dash for it, the other cats would chase join in the chase in the spirit of good fun. Once they had the ouse under their paw however, they would release it so the chase could start again.
Now my attitude towards all living things is, live and let live. Until the living things question persist in shitting and pissing in my cutlery drawer. That is a dick move. That is not going to stand.
With ten cats and a ‘big strong man’ in the house, it came down to me to stock up on the good old Victory mousetraps of my youth, kill the little bastards and sipose of the gory remains.
So who’s the apex predator in our household then?
There were other inhabitants of our house when we first moved in. Bats.
The pre-closing engineering inspection disclosed an attic full of bat droppings. The agreed upon sale price was reduced by the price of getting professionals in hazmat suits to clean out the bat guano. These minions were also supposed to have sealed the openings through which the bats were getting in. We also had the rotting wood soffit and fascia replaced to further seal the house from these unsettling freaky bird-mammals.
Deprived of the attic, one enterprising bat nonetheless managed to work her way into a tiny chink in the stones of the exterior wall of the house over the door inside our front porch.
For weeks that spring, every time we went through the door to the porch, we would have to pause to clean up little black lozenges of bat poop that kept shooting out from the wall.
The General, who tends to know about these things, decreed that we must not attempt to chink up the crack occupied by the bat, as there might be babies in a nest in there. I reluctantly assented.
Although they are as toxic as mice in their bathroom habits, at least the bats did their shitting on the porch and not in my kitchen. And unlike mice, bats are beneficial, eating up to 1200 mosquitos per hour.
The General’s surmise about there being a nest was proven correct when we opened the door one morning to find a juvenile bat crawling around on the porch floor. We managed to put a bucket over it before the cats could get it. The General set the baby up in a washbasin (wearing gloves of course) and its mother arrived to feed it.
Fortunately for us, it turns out that bats only have one baby at a time. Eventually, to our great relief, they both took off and The General hurriedly chinked up the hole where they had been nesting.
Completely sealing all the chinks in a stone house is a virtual impossibility.
One night I was awakened by weird unsettling fluttering movements in my room. The cats were going batshit crazy – see what I did there?
I turned on the lights and realized to my horror that there was a bat frantically sailing around while the cats leapt onto various pieces of furniture and from there into the air, trying to catch it.
I woke The General up, who was even more freaked out than I was. His first order of business was to protect himself from the bat flying into his face. Emptying the nearest laundry basket, he upended it over his head.
The sight of The General dashing around almost as madly as the ten cats, peering out myopically from his laundry basket anti-bat cage, while trying to throw a towel over the bat, remains one of my fondest memories.
Finally I pointed out the obvious; that we should begin by removing the cats from the theatre of operations. Mayhem ensued.
Like something out of a demented nursery rhyme, the bat fluttered, the cats fluttered after the bat, and we fluttered after the cats fluttering after the bat, one of us wearing a laundry basket on his head.
Eventually we managed to grab all ten cats and lock them into a spare bedroom. We then closed the door of the room the bat was flying around in.
My next big brain wave was to take the screen off the window and hope the bat would find its way out. Which it did.
The General removed his laundry basket headgear, we let the cats out and returned to bed. Peace descended.
Just another night living where the wild things are.