Max's 2010 Critter Count

It looks like our reality show, Max: Extreme Hunter, is on hiatus.

Last year, Max was a super hunter. He caught more animals in a single year than the total of all previous years combined. But after his thyroid condition was discovered and successfully treated, his activities trailed off at the end of last year.

This year's results pale in comparison.

	2008	2009	2010
Mice	9	5	1
Birds	4	1	1
Gophers	2	25	0
Squirrels	0	3	3
Lizards	0	6	1

The most disappointing line is the gophers. None! And we have certainly seen no decrease in gopher activity; there's plenty out there to hunt, that's for sure.

We did have some excitement during one of the squirrel incidents. Whenever Max catches an animal, he consistently brings it inside and drops it on the dining room floor. Until this year, all of the animals that he has brought inside have been dead (except for the lizards - somehow ALL of the lizards have survived). But on this one particular day, when Max dropped a squirrel onto the floor something didn't quite seem normal. Its eyes were open and the fur was pretty matted down in sections, and just as Corinne was asking if it was dead, it blinked. At this point, Corinne hastily left the room while I came up with various schemes to get this squirrel back outside. It scurried under the furniture, climbed the log walls and generally did not acquiesce to my requests. Anyone who has listened to the classic This American Life episode knows how horribly this scenario could have ended, but thankfully I managed to wrangle him down the hallway and back outside. Crisis averted.

One of the symptoms of hyperthyroidism is an increased metabolism, so was the "extreme" hunting year just an anomaly spurred by his condition? We're hoping that Max will regain some of that hunting prowess in the coming years. He did spend less time outside this year (by his own choosing), and the vet has described him as "middle-aged", so perhaps his most extreme hunting days are behind him. But we just know that he's got more killing in him.

- Mike, Corinne, Anders, and Max