Look at my sweet little dog whispering secrets to my daughter. Cosmo is the best dog ever. Very mellow around kids, lets my daughter dress him up, follows basic commands like sit, stay, drop it, does a lot of fun tricks like roll over, high-five, jump through hoop, the works!

But.

Cosmo is a rat terrier. He runs very fast and is a killing machine. The other day my husband saw him with the neighbor’s chicken in his mouth. Cosmo got reprimanded big-time in our house. He chases squirrels up trees and keeps our house and farm rodent-free.

Most of the time we don’t see him in action. One time in Maine we saw him emerge from underneath our little red cabin with a mouse’s tail dangling off his lips.

This past weekend I was turning the compost pile while the kids were running around in the field, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Cosmo digging furiously. When I looked at him directly I saw him push his pointy nose into the hole and pull out little pink things, which he dropped on the ground and started eating one by one.

Baby mice!

I called the kids so they could watch their beloved mild-mannered carnivore fulfill the circle of life. Amid screams of Ewwww, I heard one of them dare my daughter to touch the baby mouse. So I picked up one of them, the mouse, not the kid, still alive, and put it right in my daughter’s hand. Suddenly all the kids wanted to pet the baby.

It was so small. Its eyes weren’t even open yet. It kept opening and closing its mouth, looking for its Mama, but no sound came from it. My daughter wanted to feed it milk and keep it as a pet. I said it was pointless to raise it just so our dog or cat could eat it once it was grown.

We decided to put it back in the hole it was found in, to give it a chance. Maybe it would die of cold or a stray cat would snatch it up. But maybe its Mama would come back and find it and take it far away so it could be someone else’s nuisance. Or… or… maybe it will come back as some kind of super villain swearing vengeance on my dog for killing its siblings. That would be really interesting.