Please release me

Good lord, you wouldn’t believe what’s been going on here. Here I am, convalescing, deserving of some quality time and attention in my senior years and they were dribbling over that little rat. Okay, so it wasn’t a rat as such, in fact, it was smaller. What is it with humans and baby animals?

Just as soon as I get the chance, I’m going to have a word with Marmaduke about this business seeing as he was the instigator of the whole farce. Rule one: what you get up to outside the house is up to you but don’t bring your work home. Rule two: don’t compromise your inscrutability or they’ll think you’ve lost it.

He should have a refresher course from the vicious one. He knows the score; if you bring home the wildlife, behead it or extract its intestines so that it loses its cute factor. Cute baby animals and humans are a bad, bad combination and to even think of bring home a rabbit when they’ve obviously got a soft spot for them is a preposterous idea.

I, at least, had the right idea. The poor little fellow was cowering in the bush with three humans standing over him, one of whom was clutching and berating a cat. He wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t going to chase him. Being brought back by the scruff of the neck and licked gently by Marmaduke – I don’t even want to know what he was doing with it but it wasn’t very cat-like - would be enough to paralyse anyone with fear. I almost felt sorry for him. At least, I did until She picked him up and decided that rather than leave him to chill out in peace, he should be rescued and imprisoned in a cage.

They spent the next two days trying to shove milk down his throat with a syringe, commenting regularly upon his bowel movements – another human trait, dropping obsession – and feeding him dandelion leaves of which the garden is now bare.
I just couldn’t grasp the logic here. What were they going to do, capture and imprison every bit of wildlife passing through the garden? I worry, you know, because maybe if I was a bit younger, this wouldn’t have happened. I know I’m slipping, a bit arthritic, deaf (although the jury’s still out on just how deaf I really am) and when I get a shout these days, my response time is a bit over the average.

They did see sense in the end and decided to release the poor fellow. Heaven knows if it was anywhere near where he came from but given the speed at which he shot away from the forest and into the path of the oncoming car and the dive bombing magpie, he’ll be back in our garden in no time. Whether he’ll be intact is another matter.