People and pests

Our cat Joey caught a mouse the other day. Joey generally prefers occupying my lounge chair in front of the fireplace to catching mice. In fact, in the two years we’ve had him, this is the first time I’ve seen him catch anything other than his tail in the door.

Joan looked out, and saw Joey playing with something. He grabbed it in his mouth, flung it in the air, pounced on it, then flung it in the air and pounced again...

I went out to check. Joey had a mouse. A small, wet, beslobbered, utterly terrified little mouse. The words of Scottish poet Robbie Burns fitted well:

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,

Oh, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

I intervened. I grabbed Joey and held him back.

The mouse, suddenly released from torment, looked around desperately with its beady black eyes. Then it scuttled for the closest shelter, which happened to be – I still find this hard to believe – between Joey’s legs. Under Joey’s belly.

It makes me wonder why biologists would choose mice for testing intelligence.

It also makes me wonder why I should bother protecting it. Mice are, after all, pests. We hire exterminators to get rid of them. Ruthless reason suggests that I would have been smarter to kill the “wee beastie” than save it.

Is it just that they look so cute?

Deer also look adorably cute, with those big soft Bambi eyes. But they too are pests. Joan looked out the other morning and announced, “Look! The deer have stripped the bark off the weeping spruce again!”

She had been out the day before, weeding the flower bed around that tree. The bark was still undamaged then.

This is the second weeping spruce we’ve planted. The deer stripped the first one, two winters ago, by rubbing their horns against its trunk. I protected the second tree through its first winter by building a fortress of chicken wire around it, as impenetrable as most U.S. embassies in foreign countries.

But this year, I was one day late installing the fortress.

I regret to say that I muttered a string of undeleted expletives that once-President Richard Nixon might have envied.

The deer also nibbled the buds off all our roses. Ate all the foliage off a cut-leaf maple. And chomped a thriving young hawthorn tree back to a hawthorn bush.

And yet I still get a thrill, watching them saunter across our lawn in the evening dusk.

Deer and mice are a mixed blessing. The story of creation says that God made all the creatures, and declared them good. But perhaps goodness depends on its interaction with other elements of creation.

The prophet Isaiah visualized lions and lambs lying down together. Ideally, he believed, all God’s creatures – including humans – should live together in harmony.

I’m willing to make some sacrifices, so that the animals can continue to thrive.

I just wish those animals would try equally hard to live in harmony with me.

Jim Taylor welcomes comments. Send e-mails to rewrite@shaw.ca

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