For many years now, there’s been a crude — but highly effective — method of natural selection going on at Casa Kidman. The basic routine goes like this:
- Idiotic tiny skink wanders into the house through a gap.
- Our cats capture, torture and kill skink. Sometimes, just the tail, in which case we might save its life. Sometimes not.
It has, up until now, been a highly effective way to actively increase the intelligence of the outside skink population, as they’ve slowly, and in a very Darwinian fashion, learned not to come inside the house on fear of death. Appropriately, we’ve started seeing larger and larger skinks wandering around outside, secure in the knowledge that they’ve only gotten that big by being clever enough not to venture inside. Until today.
Boo. Luckily for Sidney The Skink, we caught him before the cats could do him any permanent damage.
The tail’s a writeoff, though. I wonder how long they take to grow back. Then again, i also wonder if by placing it back outside, we’re just taking a meal away from the cats and giving it to the local birds….
Normal generally-IT-or-Kids-related hilarity will resume at some point. Or possibly not.
And it is worth pointing out the cats in question then took to sitting where we remove it meal from.
Isaac is the current skink master. We usually manage to capture it before she eats it too much. The other day we had a full-grown bluetongue on our front lawn that Chaser was moderately interested in, but we got him inside before the Royal Rumble could begin.
Life with Cats, gotta love it.