But as the saying goes on the farm, better the trouble in the barn than in the house.

Well not having a barn, my trouble this time is in the house. Not the fact that I had to get a new roof recently, that’s something that every house faces every 25 years or so unless you have one of those steel roofs, which mine didn’t. And it’s not in doing things outside like the lawn that has to be cut and raked by hand. I don’t have one of those sit-down motorized lawn mowers so many have fun on as they make the lawns like manicured golf courses.

It’s really nothing in the house that is the problem this time. It’s something that has come into the house. No, it’s not the homeless cat that decided it liked us before we decided that we liked her and were forced to turn over the house to her rent and board free.

It’s what came last week to challenge the cat’s squatters’ rights to her domain, an uninvited chipmunk looking for a winter home. If it had just stayed quiet no one would have ever noticed. No one, that is except the cat, which lying in purring contentment, until the sound of a small squeak suddenly reverted the cat to its long dormant instinct of the hunter looking for prey and its whole being sprang to attention.

Then crouched in a stalking pose, eyes riveted on a waste paper basket in the corner from where the first squeak came, then a bounding leap as the chipmunk moved into the open and disappeared in the same motion. The cat leaped to catch the chipmunk and Carmel my housekeeper leaped to catch the cat. “You never know what a cornered rat will do,” she cried, her motherly fears and imagination turning the frightened chipmunk into a cat eating threat.

To Carmel’s relief and the cat’s frustration, it came up empty pawed. Round one by a large margin to the chipmunk who has been either seen nor heard since, but friends assure has not been discouraged and is in for winter.

I got all kinds of advice on how to catch the intruder, including a trap by a neighbour who said chipmunks can’t resist peanut butter. This one did. Another neighbour said poison is the only answer, but warned me that if the animal rights people found out I had used such cruel means to dispatch a threat to the safety of my house from a hungry animal feasting on wires and computer cords, I could end up in court and even with a jail sentence.

So here is the great divide in people’s values today.

If I do to a bothersome animal what every abortionist does to a human being who is considered a nuisance, I can be fined for killing the offending animal’s right to life. But the abortionist who takes human life is not only free, but the government even pays for the so-called “procedure” that ends a human life.

Not only that, an animal can fight off a threat by any person or thing that would try to kill it. The life in the womb is unable to defend itself and no one comes to help it do so.

Especially those who are against cruelty to animals.