Today I found the headless carcass of a teen rabbit in my yard, being carried around and sucked on by TK, my dog. I don’t think she is the murderer, but only an opportunist. F-cat, a hulking 17 pounds, was lurking nearby. In his younger years, he could decimate an entire litter in one day, and he always ate the heads first. He is now 14, and corpulent, so there has been less rabbit carnage, but maybe this mid-sized bun was more than he could resist. He was a stray, and those hunting habits linger feverishly in his blood.

I picked up the poor, dead thing in a newspaper and placed it in the weeds on the other side of the fence.

You see, I worry. I worry about having a killer cat at the same time as SSW. Since it’s summer, I keep F-cat out of the way of the bird since he likes sleeping on the porch. In winter, though, SSW’s floor ambulation is going to have to cease, unless the fat cat is locked up in a room.

SSW did stupidly land on the cat on the couch once, trying to reach me. F-cat is a tremendously relaxed feline, and sort of just turned his head, with an Ah, well. His insouciance is not to be trusted. I gargled some sort of panicky noise from my throat, and I got SSW to quickly step up. I think he was feeling a bit nervous, himself, landing on the cat though he is known to take an open-beaked approach to the 17 year old cat, we now call the Old Lady, or the OL, because she’s so ancient. But you can’t exactly trust the OL either. She may be senile, but there is still a spark in her eye sometimes.

And the dogs? They tend to part like the Red Sea when SSW comes trucking through. I suspect they do this because they were bit once and because they know I will get very upset if they falter. Lulu takes a half-hearted leap in the air sometimes at SSW when he flies by and this stops my heart for a second.

So one must run interference. If he was bigger, like a cockatoo, I wouldn’t worry so much. But he is only about eight inches tall, and his little toes easily wrap around my pointer finger. 100 grams equals about 3.5 ounces. Mere air, really.

Locking the Bug up in an aviary would only make him sad, lonely, and loud. Locking the dogs out the rooms I am in all the time makes them lonely and whiny and neurotic.

All good advice recommends cats and dogs to not to be in the same room with a bird. The practicality of this stumbles. I do not leave SSW alone with the mammals rambling about with him, however.

SSW doesn’t think he is a bird. He acts more like a mini T-rex. But it’s the mini part that has me in angst, mini against the mighty tooth and claw of a cat.

For the sake of SSW’s safety, when our two old cats die, I will probably not get another, and this makes me terribly sad. Cats are my first true love--sleepy, independent, and sometimes snuggly.

There have to be pound cats out there that wouldn’t give a second glance to a bird, but finding one is too tricky and complicated a matter. Let me know if you hear of any, ok?