my husband, ex-husband that is, used to say some funny things. He said, for instance, that the only purpose husbands serve is to bury dead animals and kill bugs. He said that he learned over the years that if I screamed, he needed to come running with a shoe in his hand to kill the bug. We have some serious bugs here - vinegaroons, scorpions, giant roaches that are euphemistically called date beetles. We have huge spiders, and loads of them. Now, no husband. What to do when I wake up and there is a giant bug on the wall near me? I still scream, and little Lavender, my one-year-old kitten, comes running at top speed. She loves to eat bugs and she's learned to recognize the bug scream. It's rather nice to have her take care of the bug problem, but it's pretty disgusting to listen to her crunch the bug and eat it. Talk about a mixed blessing!
Have you ever seen a cat kill a scorpion? I used to wonder how they did it, but would only see the proud cat and the dead scorpion. Finally I saw the cat in action one day. She saw a scorpion and walked over to it. She sat down and looked at it for a bit and then gave it a powerful whack with her paw and knocked it across the floor. She followed it, watched it until it twitched, and then gave it another whack. After a few good whacks, the scorpion was dead and it never had a chance to sting her.
When I first moved into my old desert shack years ago, it had mice and rats. My young cat at the time was a good hunter. Every morning there would be a row of dead mice and at least one really ugly horrible dead rat with big teeth in front of the door. She cleaned out all of the critters in record time and then got a little bored.
I watched my two cats chase a roadrunner once years ago, before the building boom, when there was plenty of desert in the middle of town. The roadrunner taunted the cats into chasing her. The cats would sneak up on the roadrunner and just as they were ready to pounce she would take off running. They would chase her, but roadrunners are very fast and she easily outran them. When she got enough distance, she would stop, turn around, and do the roadrunner version of a little victory dance and a "neener-neener-neener" chant. The cats would sneak up very craftily as she teased them, and then she would take off again. That roadrunner ran my cats around in a huge circle, over and over, until the cats were pooped and gave up. It was very very funny!
Went outside one day and saw a date beetle (about three inches long) fighting with a scorpion. The scorpion wrapped its feet around the date beetle and stung it repeatedly while the date beetle struggled. Yucko! I picked them both up with a shovel and threw them over the fence.