Thursday 4 August 2011

Today I saved a life, so I am AWESOME >:E

Right, so I've more than likely peaked your interest with the title of this blog. You're wondering "Wow, really? What do you mean by that?" And I will tell you. No, I didn't save an old granny from being run over by a steamroller. It wasn't that epic. But neither am I bragging about something small like donating blood that may save a life somewhere sometime in the future. As I am typing there is a thistle rash on my foot that is making itself known to my nervous system (as if it hasn't had enough problems this year), but it's not much more than a little nuisance to me, because I know that I did something great today, and that rash is a Medal of Honour. The life of a young songthrush hung in the balance, and I snatched its essence from the jaws of the great beyond and gave it a second chance.

I don't suppose you're familiar with our cat Scotty.

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Well, he's not our cat, but he lives in the local area and seems to have adopted us as another set of owners. Every day he comes in and pesters us for food. We give him food, and he usually leaves straight afterwards. But if we're lucky he'll hang around for a while so we can show our affection for him that he's mostly likely not too interested in, what with him being, you know, a selfish, lazy cat wherein his little mind humans are his servants. Sometimes he'll sit on the stairs and we'll "play" with him with his ball. While the results are usually hilarious, there is an unfortunate side effect. We're teaching this cat how to jump up, pull a bird to the ground, and pummel the poor thing to death for usually little more than his own amusement. Scotty is a mass murderer and a systematic assassin of the garden's eco-system.

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It's a very different picture where instead of a ball that fortunately cannot feel pain, it's a poor defenseless creature completely at his mercy. Every so often we find the body of something - a little bird, a vole (Scotty was killing them off for a whole week and I'd be surprised if there are any left), whatever he could get his paws on. Yesterday, it was a borking grass snake! We don't see those very often and it's always a treat when we do - but it's not so pleasant when one has been sighted all mangled from a first-hand Scotty mauling. It hadn't been killed, but it was in a very bad state - we're not sure if it was any kinder to let it go rather than let Scotty finish it off. But that's the thing.

I never considered that beings other than humans could kill for pleasure. My reasoning was that we had evolved into civilised beings that evolved past the stage of instinct and allowed us to take what we want from this earth, not abiding by any sort of natural order. Creatures in the wild surely only take what they need to survive. If they eat too much of their natural prey, then their numbers die out so their prey can repropagate. Apparently this isn't the case and while nature is ruthless enough, it seems that cats kill for pleasure just as we are able to - not constrained by Nature's ways of shaping them into an orderly fashion, only killing to survive.

Despite this, Scotty is still lovable. As you can imagine from the video, he's like a barrel of laughs to us when he's in the mood for it. It's a shame that he probably takes it a little too far. When playing he seems to go into a heightened state, sort of like Alex from A Clockwork Orange. At the same time he's usually in a state we call "Kill Mode" where anything that moves is something he'll claw at. I made the mistake of trying to stroke him before playtime was over and got a little scratch from him. It wasn't much of an injury but it was something to beware of. Scotty is built to kill.

Okay, so there's another side to this argument - we can't really stop Scotty from killing things all the time, he's a psycho but that's just how he's programmed, as much as I hate to have to accept it. The ways of nature dictate that only the strong survive - anything that was careless enough to catch a disease or become injured, impeding its ability to run from a predator will mean that the predator will target it and kill the careless animal so that its friends have time to escape and can do a better job of living than it. The weaker ones are killed off so the stronger (or perhaps luckier) ones survive. The result is that the animals with strong or lucky genes survive and are more successful. So, Scotty killing things only makes their species stronger, right?

Not exactly.

Birds don't always catch disease. They don't all get injured. Many things that can lead to the downfall of a bird in its life can be avoided if they play their cards right. But every bird starts out as a baby bird. A dumb, weak, defenseless baby bird that can't do much other than stand around screaming at its mother to shove something down its gob for nourishment because it can't take care of itself. You know, something that a predator like Scotty can rub out without a problem. We're training this cat to kill, so we should damn well keep an eye on him so that he doesn't kill off something that needs a chance to learn about life and how to avoid predators. Darwinian rant over.

Now, on to the awesome story. WITH ACCURATELY DEPICTING... PICTURES!

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I came down the stairs swinging my plastic black stick around like some kind of katana and wielding some crude cardboard contraption that resembled an odd custom-built revolver... LIKE A BOSS. I wasn't sure what I was hoping to achieve by doing this but I would usually roam around the house after an hour or so of Metroid Prime 2 on the Wii after I woke up, before starting up my laptop and wasting the rest of day doing trivial and un-resourceful things... like NOT working very hard on James and I's new project. (Don't worry, it's going slowly but nonetheless going... I think it's all waiting on me right now at the moment... o.o')

I heard a familiar noise behind me as I was going into the conservatory. Ah yes, the awfully-coloured turquoise bell around the horrible yellow neon collar of our daily visitor Scotty. He was sitting a few steps up from the bottom of the stairs looking at me rather funny. It must have been the total racket I was making, which my family know I am incredibly prone to making. I decided to stay still so as not to frighten him, and he broke into a fast trot... TOWARDS ME, into the conservatory. What went through his mind must have been a mix of "OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT ONE DOING" and "OH HEY THAT SCARY WEIRDO MIGHT PERHAPS FEED ME BECAUSE I'M GREEDY". I didn't know how long he'd been in and I asked Dad if he'd been fed. He said yes, but hadn't had a lot. So I decided to give him an extra serving and stroke him and stuff. After the worst attempt of getting foul-smelling cat food out of a plastic sachet ever witnessed, and smearing gravy on his face, I decided that that was enough attention for Scotty and went to go wash my hands. When I came out, Mum and Dad were out and told me to move slowly.

There were a family of THREE songthrushes just outside. There was one youngster, a mother, and another one that stood around like a lemon. We thought then it would be a good idea to keep Scotty inside, because, you know, he'd borking kill one. But he'd probably been in for some time and was getting impatient, making precious MEOW noises in an attempt to appeal to our like of cute noises. After a few minutes of watching the thrushes, we decided to let him out. The thing was that it was raining, and Scotty wouldn't like that, so Mum made the gambit of letting him out thinking he would come in again because it was so grey, and wet, and miserable, and... British. Out went Scotty.

The rain didn't bother him in the slightest bit.

We knew where he was going - heading straight for where the thrushes were. We were alerted to see him jump just out of sight, then coming back into view with one of them IN HIS borkING MOUTH. In the next moments the epicness went up to 11. And this music started playing. I didn't know where it was coming from, but I didn't care, because SHIT JUST GOT REAL.

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AND THEN THERE WERE EXPLOSIONS AND FLYING RAINBOW UNICORNS BUT THEN I GOT TIRED OF DRAWING IN PAINT. ALSO THAT PART DIDN'T HAPPEN AND THIS WHOLE THING IS CHRONICALLY EXAGGERATED.

I brought the little murderer back inside. He let out a long pitful MEOOOOOOOOW but the general response from the three of us was something like "NO. SHUT YOUR GOB YOU DEPRAVED CRETIN". Apparently he went to sleep in the master bedroom, so it looks like he won't be troubling little birds for another 12 hours now, at least.

My Dad congratulated me as being a "fearless, lion-hearted hero who saved the life of the baby bird from a pointless and gruesome death". Where is that bird now? We don't know. Maybe it'll get better somehow. Maybe it will not survive its injuries. Or maybe it will fall victim to another predator, maybe even Scotty again. But the point is that I saved it and gave it another chance. At last, my inner paladin had a chance to shine through and protect those close to my heart... or something. Too bad no-one really needs a knight in shining armour these days. What do I do, save you from a smoking addiction? Or a sub-standard boyfriend? Maybe I was born into the wrong era. I should have been a Viking or something. Nah, too many dragons. And not enough internet.














You want an epic story with epic illustrations, a link to some epic music AND some epic guy's Vlog, AND the conclusion to Teh Ebil Fridge Saga all in one post?


There's no pleasing some people. ¬.¬