How not to wake up on a monday

When we got up this morning, the cat had horked up another hairball – on the stairwell landing this time. Pleasant animal. He seems to be having a bit of a hairball problem these days, so we're going to look into a change in his diet to see if we can't sort that out.

Just as I was leaving for work this morning, he came through the cat flap with a live vole in his mouth. He was quite happy about it. The vole? Less so. He knows that whenever he brings us a gift, we get rid of it as soon as we see it. It would seem that this one wasn't a gift though, cause he didn't want to part with his latest plaything.

Cut to the scene of me chasing the cat around the kitchen to try and get rid of the thing before he lets go of it on the floor and it scampers and dies in an unreachable corner.

Now, normally, we'd just find dead rodents on the floor and we chuck them in the green bin. This one was still alive though, and not in any sort of good shape.

I just couldn't in good conscience chuck it in the bin, and I couldn't just let it go either. It was a small vole pup and when I put it on the green bin lid, it was still able to hobble around, but in rather a lot of distress.

Now the humane way to cull a rodent is cervical dislocation. That's all well and good to know the basics of it, but when you've never done it yourself, it becomes more than a simple theoretical exercise. I went to get a pair of work gloves and used the plier head on my leatherman to immobilize the head at the back of the neck. A sharp pull at on the tail should normally suffice to dislocate the neck.

Except that I was rather nervous.

I might have pulled a bit hard.

Cause the head flew off.

Um… ew?