Let's get down to business

[karfar]

Aha! And I thought it was something complicated, thanks

[Glitch]

[rotorhead]

My wife got fairly freaked out a time or two by one of Alaskas most voracious carnivores, in fact, we kept finding them dead in our house! Here's what they look like...


It's a shrew, and by weight it's one of the most relentless predators on the planet. They've got a sky-high metabolic rate and have to hunt continuously, they can't go even a day without eating or they starve. The cat kept dragging them in to play with in the middle of the night, to our considerable irritation. The real problem started when we missed one that he left in a laundry pile. After going through the wash with our clothes, it REALLY stunk up the dryer.

They've got a really nasty, musty smell, some sort of scent gland. I thought we'd have to sell the dryer since it seemed that the smell was never gonna come out. Eventually alternating loads sprinkeled with baking soda and towels wet with dilute bleach got it down to a tolerable level. There's no telling how many of them that dang cat drug in from the backyard but between them and the voles it was a miniature slaughterhouse at times. In fact, when we ripped up the carpet to tile the downstairs we found several half-eaten carcasses down by the tack strips, far out of reach of the cat. One of them must have gotten away alive and found the remains of its less-fortunate buddies to snack on....yuck.

[karfar]

God those things are ugly, aren't they? And moles too