At our house, cats have responsibilities. Some of them seem to know it and some don’t.

“Brian,” we say several times a day to the big fluffy orange specimen of Felis catus who’s named after an alcoholic cartoon dog, “you can’t just sleep on the couch. Your job is to catch squirrels. Go catch some squirrels.”

Sometimes he goes, though more often he just rolls over and looks at us upside down with half-shut, adoring eyes, purring in thankfulness. How can you argue with that?

The squirrels, though, are a problem, and whether Brian likes it or not, he and his buff-colored elder Mojo are the solution. Chipmunks are trouble too, and the mice are worse. Unless the cats fulfill their duties.

The different rodentiae that constantly try to share our space are sort of cute themselves, but the problem is they eat the house. And the eating is not restricted to gnawing on the pine logs and inner walls, which is bad enough. But they also chew wiring, which when it frays can spark, and not much of a spark can send the beautiful but tinderlike pine into flames. The mice – Mus musculus, or Mighty Mouse – are troublesome also for their defecations, which in time can turn the inside of a wall into a stinkhole and create conditions for pretty nasty illnesses.

Like terrorists, they can’t be eradicated but they have to be deterred. Since poison seems cruel (as well as ineffective) and Havahart traps are the rough equivalent of shooing mosquitoes, cat game wardens are the natural answer. When they understand their jobs, that is. Some, like Brian, are preoccupied with comfortable spots inside the house. But other cats we’ve had seem eager to receive their instructions.

We’ve had four cat geniuses: Sofia, Sparky, Macy and Mojo. Sofia and Sparky specialized in musculus elimination. They would periodically go on mouse-hunting tears, and although they never lived together, both followed a tradition of neatly lining up the kills on the porch. One day I found five mouse corpses side by side on the doorstep like war casualties.

Macy was a squirrel, mole and bird specialist, and so is her protege Mojo. (The moles are no threat, nor are the birds, but cats have their own ideas about which powers of darkness need to be counteracted.) Two winters ago, an intruder was in the bedroom wall. You could hear him gnawing and gnashing at night, but there was no way to get to him. Then one June day, I saw Mojo carry a red squirrel across the driveway, and after that the wall was quiet. The wiring was no longer being chewed, and the stinkhole possibilities dried up, as it were.

You can’t really teach the cat its job, you can only make suggestions, like we do to Brian. But they do seem to learn from each other. Brian is slowly coming around to Mojo’s way of thinking about rodentiae in motion. And Mojo, who is a natural – if boisterous – genius to begin with, obviously got instruction from gray Macy, whose Buddha-like calm and lightning pounce were native qualities.

Macy effectively had no teacher because her predecessor, Hunter, was a completely misnamed cat couch potato that would have been fired for not showing up to work, if cats could be fired. Which they can’t, because they roll over on their backs and stretch and look up with half-shut, adoring eyes.

-DWILDE@BANGORDAILYNEWS.NET