dragonlady7

harm

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Beans the cat is an asshole, as cats are. She’s the smartest critter on this farm, which isn’t saying a whole lot, but. She’s far cannier than the dog, and much brighter than either of the other two cats. She’s not the smartest cat I’ve ever known, but she’s not dim, as cats go.

She likes to get into things. She can’t open doors, and isn’t a big climber, but she’s decent at jumping and extremely good at creeping.

so, behind the cut, two tales of Beans’ adorable assholery, both involving animal harm, but no harm to her. so. (one mentions chicken processing, the other typical and terrible feline hunting behavior) (yes, sorry DW readers, the cut won’t work for you. It should be here.)

Anyway. Yesterday was chicken processing, and as usual, we did all the processing in the morning, broke for lunch, and then came out in the afternoon to do the packaging. At the end of processing, the chickens all go into big 100-gallon stock tanks full of ice water to get them down to the recommended 34 degrees they’re supposed to be at within two hours, I think? There’s a rule, or something. Anyway. All those tanks are inside the evisceration room, and the door shuts, and so it’s safe in there to leave them while we eat.

Well. There’s a window into the room, which is how we pass the carcasses from the kill room into the clean room. It doesn’t have a way to close. It’s normally not an issue.

I came out after lunch with Sister to get set up for packaging. She and I had been setting things up in the outer room– we do the packaging in another corner adjacent to the kill room, next to the ice machine and the big three-bay wash sink.

Sister went and opened the door to the clean room and suddenly shrieked, and I turned in great alarm to see–

none other than Beans running out the door with a discarded chicken trachea that had fallen on the floor hanging out of her mouth.

The little shit had hopped up into the window and then walked across the freshly-sanitized counter to explore the room. Fortunately she hadn’t hopped up to look in the tanks. We could easily see from her little muddy footprints everywhere she’d gone in the room, so we knew she hadn’t contaminated anything except the counter we had to re-wash…

She has this way of hunching her back as she runs so that she kind of looks like a little raccoon. She is adorable and so terrible.

Today, I went out on the porch to put my boots on and go do work, and she was there. I spoke to her briefly, and then as I put my boot on I noticed something moving next to the bench. It was a vole, hunched and trembling; clearly she’d brought it up onto the porch and was waiting for it to run so she could chase it again. I called her an asshole, but opted not to interfere, as I thought the poor little critter was likely injured and wouldn’t survive if I did try to save it.

I mentioned it a little while later when I came back inside and couldn’t find it anywhere on the porch. Beans had gone to sleep in a blanket piled on top of Farmkid’s car seat, the contents of the family car that had gone to the dealer for repair.

BIL said, “Oh, I saw that vole. You know where she put it? Inside my boot.”

Sister had picked it up with a flip-flop and had carried it out to the garden and set it free. She said it was able to run, so maybe it’ll be okay. Cats are really terrible.

But WHY, Beans, would you put a LIVE VOLE into a man’s BOOT. I am glad I have developed a habit of dumping my boots out before I put them on…