Tonight was the night I served the cat half her normal dinner, looked her squarely in the eye, and said “If you can afford to be letting mice go just for fun, you obviously don’t need to be getting so much free food.”

In my defense, earlier in the day, I had watched the cat catch and release a mouse in our living room — not once, not twice, but FIVE TIMES. She would catch it, play with it, and then get visibly bored before releasing it, letting it run off, and going back to look for it in the spot it had left minutes earlier.

This mouse — which should have been dead five times over — sat on a dining room chair and looked me in the eye until I walked over to the sideboard, pulled the cat out from under it (where she was looking for the mouse, which hadn’t been under the sideboard in fully, no joke, entire minutes), and carried her over to the chair, at which point the mouse took off for the kitchen and we started all over again.

I left the cat climbing a radiator in which the mouse had briefly hidden, at this point, some fifteen minutes earlier.

So yeah, no. Any cat that lets a mouse go and literally chill in a dining room chair? Needs to get a little hungry.

Congratulate me, guys. I’ve officially become the villain from a Disney cartoon.