Saturday, October 8, 2011

An Unusual Day (Severed Squirrel Head)

An unusual day:
When I woke this morning and came down the stairs, I saw that the cat food bags in the kitchen closet had been torn open and the food bowls were totally cleaned out. This usually means that an animal, usually a raccoon, has gotten through the cat door, which has a magnetic lock. Both cats wear magnets on their collars and the magnets unlatch the cat door so they can push it open. The door will not open inward without the magnetic latch being activated. Raccoons are smart and also have claws that enable them to hook the door and pull it outward to get in.


But usually the raccoons tear up the entire kitchen closet, dumping food out. In this case, the bowls were empty, and some of the treat bags were torn, but the bins hadn’t been opened. So I cleaned up the food and figured I’d have to put it away at night again.
I went back to the computer to work (telecommute, two days a week). Later, while walking through the living room I noticed something on the floor. It was the body of a squirrel, with just a bloody mess where the head had been. I cleaned up the carcass, bagged it, and threw it in the outside trash. Both cats were staring at me with innocent looks.


Back to telecommuting, clicking, uploading and so on. Somehow I had forgotten about the head. Cats don’t eat heads. I went looking for it. Under the pillow, nah, the cats aren’t Mafia. I looked everywhere, except where the head is, of course. No head, anywhere. Two heads are not better the one, especially when mine is one of them and the other one is rotting under furniture somewhere. Just a pleasant surprise I can look forward to, probably requiring a little biologic time to pass?

2 comments:

emory said...

hey Ed-
I wonder if squirrels can live for extended periods of time w/o their heads, like chickens? Wish you'd gotten a picture of headless squirrel with cats in background looking innocent.

Ed Deasy said...

Squirrels without heads. Even Google is silent on this issue! If its happened to someone, they blanked it out.

I wish I had taken a picture, but, frankly, I was too disgusted to think about it.
It was the raccon intrusions that were really unsettling. In the beginning we paid for a commercial company to trap them, but all they came up with were ground hogs.
I was watching from the inside when a large raccoon pushed the door, frame and all, into the house, and proceeded in with me standing there. Screaming and pot banging finally convinced him to exit. He kept returning until relocated. A furry, intrusive and relentless, neighbor, he was. We probably relocated 4 raccoons in three seasons. Locust Ave. is a wild place.