Dizzy the evil moggy

Look at the picture below. That's Dizzy the evil moggy, ruler of the Porter household, bane of Xena the fat beagle's existence. She looks like she's getting ready to rip the arms off anyone that comes within range.



It's all an act. Those of us that live with her know it's an act. The chooks certainly aren't afraid of her, even Xena remembers sometimes, especially when there's food around. She can usually fool visitors though. All it takes is an evil glare and they won't go with in five metres of her, not easy when the room is only four metres across.

I'm sure she has a good giggle about it afterwards.

As I said though, it's an act. She doesn't rule the house, she's an old softy and actually a bit of a nature lover, as she proved yesterday.

We decided the divas' pen needed a bit of a clean out. You'll recall from a previous post that the divas are in fact four chooks named after the Young Divas of Australian Idol fame. One of them even made it onto a fan forum for said divas.

Anyway, cleaning out the pen is an easy job as it's simply a dome that can be lifted by one person and moved around. All you need to do is rake everything up and chuck it in the compost bin, then spread another bag of sugar-cane mulch before replacing the dome.

The nest is just a large plastic flower pot surrounded with old roof tiles and nearly always has four eggs in it each afternoon. We've learnt from experience that whenever we clean out the pen there's always a family of mice under the nest. Yesterday was no exception.

Donna saw one of them before we moved the roof tiles, so I went upstairs to get Dizzy. Until recently, Dizzy has always been an indoor cat. It's only been about the last six months that we've started letting her out in the yard in the afternoon. We know she won't go far, and she always comes running at 5pm when it's dinner time. She's about ten years old now, so she's pretty predictable.

She followed me out into the back yard, almost walking to heel, and then over to the pen. Once she was in position we lifted up the nest and there were two adult and five baby mice. Needless to say, the parents immediately bolted in opposite directions, leaving the babies to their own devices.

What did Dizzy do? After having the babies pointed out to her because she hadn't noticed them, she sniffed them and watched them try to crawl away. That's it! No pouncing on them and devouring them in one mouthful, no clawing them to pieces. She just looked at them.

She didn't even do anything when the chooks came over and ate them from under her nose.

She was bird watching later on, sitting there watching about a dozen lorikeets eat. She got bored with that though and decided to run a couple of laps across the yard to work up an appetite before going upstairs to see if dinner was ready.

Evil? No way, she slept on my feet last night.