As I reported yesterday, the Goldberg Household was thrown into turmoil yesterday when our cat introduced a live, not quite predatory chipmunk into the house. My wife (and child) spent much of the afternoon trying to extricate it from the missus’ home office. It was a stressful effort because they needed to use the cat to locate the chipmunk and then remove said cat before it could actually catch the chipmunk. The order had come down from my daughter that the beast’s life must be spared because, as she said an estimated four trillion times, “he’s a cute little guy” undeserving of a death-by-feline.
Hence I was ordered to procure a humane trap. I went to the hardware store (Strosniders in Bethesda — best hardware store in the D.C. region, by the way) and the very helpful staff chuckled at my plight and then insisted I not buy a trap because it probably wouldn’t work — the traumatized critter wouldn’t have much interest in bait. (Since my research into chipmunkery was largely confined to the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies, I had planned on leaving a profitable record contract in the cage.) We then discussed more effective ways to trap it. The consensus (among readers as well) was that we needed to create some kind of hole that the beast would instinctively run into.
We ended up using the rolled-up architectural plans for our house. He (or, just as plausibly, she) ran into the tube very quickly. The creature was released, rattled but intact (and a good deal lighter, since it had expressed its fear in, uh, tangible ways inside the house). I sang a few bars of “Born Free.” The cat, meanwhile, is clearly livid over our misguided and ungrateful lenience.
Cosmo was disgusted by the whole affair.