We were woken in the middle of ythe night by Izzy, crying. We leapt out of bed and DH ran downstairs.
On the bottom step was a rat. A dead rat. Not a baby.
But that wasn't the cause of the crying. Izzy was watching out of the kitchen door, and could see an enormous grey cat in the garden. When DH arrived in the kitchen, she went through the catflap and attacked, and there was a horrendous fight.
She came back in, and we checked her over to see if she had been bitten (by the rat or ny the cat). She seemed OK, just a bit wobbly.
We aren't sure if the rat was a present for us, or whether she was staring to teach the kittens about catching things. We aren't sure if she killed the rat herself, or whether it was already dead. She'd gone out of the cat flap at ten (I love SureFlap Smart Connect cat flaps!, so ythat's when it would have been brought in. Rigor had set in, and a quick google told us that the timing meant she might have killed it herself.
She's never been a ratter, so that was a bit of a surprise. She's not been a fighter either, so we were bemused by the night's events.
I mentioned this to Miss Tween, and she reminded me that we had had a big grey cat visiting before, and I had called it ThunderThighs because it had jumped on the fence and made the fence wobble. MIss Tween also found a load of cat fur (both Izzy's and Thunderthighs) at the scene of the battle.
We checked her (Izzy, not Miss Tween) over again in the morning, and she seems OK.
It occurred to us that maybe Izzy went out to fight to protect the kittens?
