This morning I discovered a spider on the kitchen counter, which is a place I prefer not to discover bugs. Crawling out from behind the toaster!

Normally I evict such critters down the back stairs, but today as I got it into an empty cream cheese container, my housemate’s kitty pussy-footed by the kitchen. Now, my housemate told us several stories about Zoe’s prowess as a bugger, so I got her attention and tipped the spider out on the carpet in front of her.

The spider sat. Zoe sat. The spider set off across the carpet. Zoe smoothly moved in front of it and patted it with her paw. The spider chose a new direction. Repeat.

This progressed to Zoe sniffing and tasting the spider — taking it in her mouth and then dropping it on the carpet again — for a minute before she finally swallowed it, and sniffed around the surrounding area of carpet for a little bit to make sure, I don’t know, that she hadn’t missed any legs.

Most likely this is horrible karma, to feed spiders to kitties, like feeding chickens to tigers (which I’ve also been party to), but then again, is it bad to begin with, keeping kitties and tigers in places where they cannot freely catch their own spiders or chickens?

(Aside: The tiger purred while eating the chicken. Zoe seemed to approach the spider as more of a curiosity, than a valued entree.)