Cleo

Like everyone else in our family Cleo had a highly developed interest in food. Being half-aristocrat, she made it clear she considered herself a cut above pet shop rubbish.

Once she’d figured out the fridge was the source of high-class menu items, such as salmon, she spent many hours worshipping its great white door. Occasionally she’d run an exploratory front paw along the plastic seal, but her attempts were fruitless.

When I opened the fridge door one morning, she accelerated like a furry cannonball across the kitchen floor and jumped right inside the crisper. When I yelled at her to come out she burrowed farther into the carrots. No way was she relinquishing the right to live inside her own five-star restaurant. When I tried to pry her out she batted me with a claw.

I closed the fridge the door to a crack and peeked inside. Eyeing the ice cliff of the door, with its built-in cartons of milk and juice, Cleo didn’t look so confident. When I flung the door open again she pounced from her nest of carrots and shook herself on the kitchen floor, as if to say, “I was only doing it to keep the vegetables happy.”

Abandoning the idea of fridge habitation, Cleo worked on other ways of adding gourmet flair to her diet. Emptying her litter  box one day I discovered two rubber bands and a length of cotton thread had worked their way through her digestive tract.

With newly discovered power in her back legs, she’d spring onto the kitchen bench for a gastronomic preview of whatever we were having for dinner. Chicken breast and fish were favorites, but she developed a taste for mincemeat, cake, raw eggs and, of course, butter.

If I didn’t stow the butter safely away in the fridge, suspicious-looking tracks would appear on its surface. It’s hard to know if Cleo really liked butter or just pretended to enjoy it to taunt Rata, who was trapped unwillingly down at ground level. Our omnivorous golden retriever was genuinely obsessed with processed animal fats. At Sam’s fifth birthday party she had wolfed down an entire slab of butter that had been left inadvertently on the coffee table. We waited for her to turn green around the whiskers, and prepared for an ambulance run to the vet, but Rata remained cheerful as ever. The dog’s Teflon-lined stomach could handle anything from shoelaces to picnic lunch leftovers, including (if available) the paper napkins.

As the days shortened Cleo discovered the sort of food she liked best. Thanks to Jason’s hunting lessons, she tuned into her wildcat side and learned the thrill of self-service. Prowling through the flowerbeds like a black panther she explored the victim potential of everything that moved, including blades of grass. Even the daisies were in danger. A crack in the path near the front gate revealed an exciting potential prey: ants. Her head would dart from side to side as these corporate workers of the garden went about their business. Cleo would tease them with her paw, only to be disappointed. Instead of playing a game, the ants would simply keep marching ahead, oblivious to fun or danger.

Her first triumph was a praying mantis she discovered on the window ledge in Rob’s bedroom. I’ve always had a soft spot for praying mantises. Their revolving eyes and articulated limbs make them look like visitors from outer space. Geeks of the insect world, they live quietly and are endearingly harmless (except to the occasional fly or grasshopper). Unlike other insects they have no interest in sucking blood, stinging or spreading fatal illness.

Which is why I was upset to find one in Cleo’s clutches one sunny afternoon. She was teasing the poor thing, letting it imagine it had escaped and then pouncing on it again. My first instinct was to rescue the insect. But it had already lost a leg. There was no hope.

For the first time I was mildly repelled by our kitten. Then again, if I tried to stop her hunting and occasionally killing other creatures I’d be denying her essential catness. Somewhere in the back of my head I could hear Mum saying You can’t interfere with Nature. Not that her pioneering upbringing mirrored the sentiment. Our ancestors had no qualms reducing huge tracts of land to ash.

Guilty with praying mantis betrayal, I backed out of Rob’s room and closed the door. Ten minutes later, I discovered Cleo dozing in the sun on Rob’s pillow. She opened a self-satisfied eye at me and closed it. The headless torso of the praying mantis lay on the floor under the window ledge.