Somehow, I felt compelled to buy this pillow case yesterday. Why was that?

I heard someone explain once that the ‘dominion’ given to humans over animals after we were expelled from the garden of Eden was mistranslated. It should be ‘guardianship’. Well, we know that now to our cost.

Guardianship is how I see my part in Felix’s life. I’ve not managed to keep him inside for the first 10 months, as the vet advised. I haven’t even kept him inside at night. Consequently, I had a sleepless night when I couldn’t locate him after hearing a fight-to-the-death cat fight in the distance.

I suspect he was a spectator rather than a participant, as he appeared in the morning, unscathed.

He brought a mouse into the house on Thursday night and proceeded to lose it under my bed. I opened the french doors so it could escape, but it chose to run further into the house. It sat under a side table in the living room for a while before I was able to get it to the front door – only to be greeted by Felix, and I thought we’d have to go through the whole saga again. Fortunately, not. The mouse lives to face another day, like the bird I rescued from Felix a couple of months ago. In that case, I applied a choke-hold on Felix until he let go. I had seen this technique used successfully by the owner of an American pit bull which had my border terrier in its vice-like jaws.

Animals just do what they do, as an interview on the radio this morning revealed. Human animals, with the double-edged sword of ‘superior intelligence’ tend to overthink everything. The ability to catastrophize is perhaps the worst thing, in my experience, certainly when we have animals in our care. But, as the photo shows, Felix just takes life as it comes, and it looks pretty good to him.