Amy Fleming Tue 3 Nov 2026 06.55 GMT Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T his is a cat-and-mouse story in which the cats are the real pests. My old house, despite being next to rodent-filled woods, was blissfully mouse-free … until, during lockdown, we got two kittens, Mimi and Ruben. As soon as their fine motor skills were sufficiently sharpened, they started hunting. Thankfully, they weren’t into birds, but wood mice became their specialism. I suppose the dearth of mice indoors meant they had to catch them outside. The tabby twins would then bring their prey back to their lair (our house) and release them, still miraculously alive. Perhaps they thought mice would make fun pets
You would know they had brought in a mouse when they sat guarding sections of ill-fitting skirting or gaps under cupboard doors, uttering odd “prittering” sounds. Cue us humans moving furniture and dashing about, getting down on our hands and knees, reduced to hunting the mice ourselves with upturned Tupperware boxes. If we caught them, we released them in the woods, locking our yowling cats inside so they couldn’t see exactly where. But some mice inevitably escaped into the fabric of the house
During what seemed like a nice, quiet time on the hunting front, the fridge began to stink, a faint smell of rotten-eggs gradually growing into a putrid stench. When I moved the fridge out to look behind it,