Sudden shock

Just finished my breakfast. Wenusia, having finished hers, asks to be let outside. I'm sitting at the kitchen table, replete. Suddenly, a commotion on the window sill outside. 

It's Wenusia, with a live blackbird in her jaws. It's squawking, terrified. I open the window and shout: "Wenusia! Nie wolno!" (one always speaks to cats in Polish). I wrest the terrified blackbird out of Wenusia's mouth as it struggles for life. For a second, I'm clutching the poor bird in my hand but it's fighting hard; I throw the bird into the air to launch it, to give it a chance to fly off, but it has had its right wing broken. It tries to get away but soon falls to the ground. Wenusia pounces on it from the window sill and bites its neck. Feathers fly. Nature red in tooth and claw, a Ted Hughes poem witnessed live. The five-month-old kitten that just an hour earlier had been purring contentedly on my bed turns out to a ruthless hunter-killer.

Having delivered the coup de grâce, Wenusia scampers off, puzzled by my strongly adverse reaction to the first 'present' she has brought me. The bird was meant as a gift, a token of gratitude to her human provider. And there I am shouting angrily at her.

A spot of blackbird blood remains on my kitchen window, a reminder of the true nature of felines. Entirely happy to be petted and pampered by humans, but essentially small furry killing machines, honed by evolution for a niche in the ecosystem in which small birds and mammals are the principal sources of food for Felis catus.

After a while, Wenusia returns to the kill and drags the dead bird to the other side of the drive to continue playing with it. She leaps, she pounces, she throws it into the air, she spins it round in a mad dance. Below: "I'm going to pull your head off because I don't like your head."

Eventually, she leaves it, and jumps up to the window ledge, asking me to let her in again. Which I do. She goes to her bowl, eats some dry cat food, then asks to be let out again. She jumps down into the garden, and saunters up to the dead blackbird to play with it some more. A reminder that cats hunt more for the amusement than for nourishment.

This shocking incident brings me up sharp to reconsider the responsibility we humans have for our pets – cats in particular. 

A cat cooped up in a twenty-square metre bedsit flat is denied that true nature. Cats, being conscious beings, should be allowed their agency. Unlike dogs (which have coexisted with humans since hunter-gatherer times), cats (which have only coexisted with humans since the dawn of agriculture) cannot (yet) be trained to respond to human commands. And in any case, a cat playing with a wounded bird is in the throes of instinct. Given another 15,000 years of cat-human coexistence cats might learn to sit, beg and come to heel, but will never be able to disengage from such moments. Watch a cat in a state of alertness; its ears are like two radar dishes, swivelling independently of each other scanning for signs of movement in the long grass, eyes darting, head traversing in short jerky movements – it is all attention. And its intention is to kill, ruthlessly.

Below: scrubbing up. Back in the kitchen, Wenusia is purring and rubbing herself against my legs.

I feel great pity and sorrow for the loss of the blackbird. This species (Turdus merula) is by far my favourite songbird; its rich and varied repertoire standing out from the two-tone monotony of the cuckoo, the simple cooing of the dove or the crude trumpeting of the pheasant. Blackbird songs are complex, suggesting higher levels of communication between individual birds. Maybe I'm anthropomorphising too much here, but listening in on the conversation between two blackbirds on a summer's day, I'm hearing the exchange of commentary upon the day's proceedings, maybe a shared exchange of opinions of how wonderful it is to be alive on a day such as this. Conscious beings, clearly.

I don't want to be responsible for a local songbird apocalypse, especially if Wenusia someday brings into life a litter of kittens that live indoors and outdoors. It will soon be spring, and the trees in the wood next door will be full of nesting birds. Such then is nature. I ponder my role in it, a part of the local ecosystem.

Now the blackbird's body – an adult male, possibly quite old – lies on the gravel, bereft of life, one dead eye staring up at the sky, surrounded by feathers, its lower body a mess of blood, entrail and excrement.

Its consciousness passes on.

POSTSCRIPT

Upon my walk today, I chanced upon a dead hare (in a ditch by the DK50) and a dead field mouse (on the footpath from Nowe Grobice to Chynów). A reminder to me that death is omnipresent in nature.

This time five years ago:
The Mechanical Engineers

This time six years ago.
Ealing in the earliest of spring

This time eight years ago:
Fat Thursday: a blast against sugar

This time nine years ago:
The Devil is in doubt

This time ten years ago
Are you aware of your consciousness?

This time 12 years ago:
"Why are all the good historians British?"

This time 13 years ago:
Central Warsaw, evening rush-hour

This time 14 years ago:
Cold and getting colder

This time 16 years ago:
Uwaga! Sople!

This time 17 years ago:
Ul. Poloneza at its worst