Life and death in a mini-zoo

EARLY IN the morning, I find Mickey Mouse lying on his side on the floor –- dead.

I look more closely at the corpse, a pretty little thing, grey on the upper parts of its body and cream on its underside.

The mouse looks healthy and well-fed. Could it have been someone’s pet? Well, it’s too late now to return the escapee to its owner, if indeed it really was a pet.

The mouse is small enough to have slipped through the wire mesh on the top floor and run downstairs. Stupid mouse, to have run into a house full of cats!

Then Mickey’s murderer rushes down the stairs. Thong the soi cat must have chased it from the fourth floor, then played with it before breaking its neck. Even as Mickey’s little corpse lies on the floor, he bats it around.

Thankfully, Thong doesn’t consider the mouse as food or tried to hide the body on my bed. I push him away and sweep Mickey into some newspaper.

I’m also relieved that all the animals in my mini-zoo are vaccinated every year against diseases like rabies, in addition to receiving monthly treatments against parasites.

Thong, the idiot cat, is entirely ungrateful.

He wants to get out of the house and into the soi. He wants to be with his best friend, Thep, another soi cat. He wants to be free.

Thong doesn’t understand that I’m determined to turn him into a housecat. I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m trying to protect his life – and mine.

Usually, when Thong, after a day wandering the soi, wants to come into the house, he waits on the third-floor balcony for me to let me in.

Just recently, though, he’s ended up on the roof, on top of the fourth floor. There’s no way he can come inside by himself. He can’t slip through the wire mesh – he’s definitely not as small as a mouse. And he’s terrified of heights. He can climb up but not jump down.

Up on the roof, Thong, so clumsy and accident-prone, simply looks over the edge of the roof and cries sadly.

To help him, I have to climb an aluminium stepladder to reach up to him, but the second he sees my hand, he backs away.

Instead, he runs to the other side of the roof overlooking the soi. Nervously, he paces back and forth, screaming unhappily.

He’s not looking where he’s going. In his nervous pacing, he comes dangerously close to the latest addition to my mini-zoo - a bunch of bees who have hung their hive from the wire mesh on the fourth floor.

The insects don’t bother anyone as long as no one bothers them. In the mornings, I see some of them flitting around the flowers, then rushing back home.

Thong is so upset that he steps right on top of the hive. The cat will not survive an onslaught of a bunch of angry bees.

Fortunately, he runs to the back again. This time, I can grab him by the back of his neck and lower him down. Screaming in terror, he swings back and forth. The ladder swings back and forth too. I’m about to fall when Thong jumps to the ground and runs down to the kitchen for some comfort food.

The next morning, he’s back on the roof again, and I’m up an unstable ladder. I decide he’s now an inside cat.

A cat who wants freedom will get freedom. Two days later, he escapes to the soi – but so far, he waits on the third floor to come back inside, away from swaying stepladders and angry bees.