Manatees and mermaids

While driving aimlessly around Dallas the other day, I found myself a witness of a small natural drama. It occurred at a stoplight, and the players were a bird and a cat.

The hunter... an attractive creature, ghostly with bluish gray stripes on the tail and face. Thin, likely feral. It approached the bird (a female grackle) as it ambled along, pausing intermittently to snatch crickets, seemingly oblivious. The cat broke into a sprint, but not before the bird's mate called out a warning from a small cedar elm standing alongside. Life for the bird, an empty stomach for the cat.

The light turned green, and I was obliged to move or else anger the line of cars that trailed behind.

So what's so special about that? Cats kill birds everyday, birds escape everyday. But pensiveness struck, and I wondered who had the better day, the cat who succeeds or the bird that escapes? Is it worse to be a cat that starved or a bird that was killed? Every story has two sides, after all.

I'm still not sure which side I would take.