Does your cat bring you "little surprises" when you least expect them? Of course he or she does - a mouse, a bird, a frog, the list of little casualties is endless.
In my case, our supplier of bountiful gifts is Lunar the 6-year feral that we took in. Lunar was only 3-weeks old when she came to us, the sad result of the feral community on Hadleigh Road Industrial Estate. A tiny mite right from the start, who grew from a small bundle of fluff into the beautiful & charming compact little cat that we have today. The collecting trait started as a mere whim - Lunar appears to have a penchant for peanuts, or more correctly, monkey nuts in the shells. We have homed a selection of hamsters, gerbils & degus over the years and all these love monkey nuts. We discovered early on though that if one of the rodents was offered a nut, Lunar was insistent that she have one too. She would strut proudly around the house with her "prize" and after a while she started to present these objet d'art at my husband's feet. When he threw the nut across the room, she would run & pick it up and bring it back to him. Like I said, just a mere whim....
And that's when it started - the beginning of Lunar's fetish for inanimate objects (I can't for the life of me ever remember her bringing home a shrew, though the odd Slow Worm have fallen foul of her).
It began with a sock, a little baby boy's sock to be precise, small and neat and obviously recently washed! After a bit of detective work, I ended up handing the sock back to my neighbour with the apology "I'm so sorry, she's never done anything like this before, I'm sure it's a one-off". Was it? No... the collection grew & became more diverse. The next item was another baby sock, this time a little girl's; sadly we did not know anyone who may have owned this item so it ended up in the bin. Next was a latex glove, then a cigarette packet, a pack of chewing gun, a man's woollen glove, various bottle tops & assorted miscellaneous items including silver foil, a shopping list and then a brand spanking new blue cat collar that did not belong to any of my troops!! Finally, the piece-de-resistance - the headless rifleman. Brought in at some point during a warm Saturday afternoon & lovingly placed in the washing-up bowl for me to find when I next did the dishes....
Since then, her obsession does seem to have waned a bit & the gifts are not so frequent now though I will sadly admit that the rifleman has a place in my heart and remains in the nick-nack drawer in the kitchen...
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