We still have one kitten left from this summer's cat crop. Here she is, drinking leftover-from-supper chicken noodle soup. She is very sweet, furry, and has no problem being picked up or petted, unlike our other outside cats. Anybody out there want a kitten?
Right now we have three-and-a-half adult cats hanging around the farm. Calico Cat, the one that we managed to catch and spay last year, comes and goes. The other three (Pepper, Sally and Zoe) stay close by. If I could manage to catch any of those three female felines, I would have them spayed in a second. But they won't let me touch them, unless I'm feeding them. If they have food in front of them, they are usually too busy scarfing it down to pay attention to me. But if I tried to grab hold of them they would shred my arm to pieces.
Mother Nature actually does a pretty good job of keeping our cat numbers low. We had four litters this year, totaling about eighteen kittens. Of those, we adopted one for an inside cat, brought two to the humane society, and have the remaining one still outside. The others -- well, let's just say the others didn't meet with such a kind fate.
I'm quite pleased that we only have one kitten left from the summer. I don't want any more outdoor cats. A friend of mine tells me that when they moved out to their farmstead, they had just one male and one female cat. Now, nine years later, they have over thirty. And she feeds them all.
Another farmer friend of mine wasn't so soft-hearted. At one point the cat population on his farm totaled thirty-nine cats. He decided that enough was enough, and got his shotgun down from the rack. Now he has none.
I don't want to have to do that.
Maybe I'll put an ad in the paper. One cute and friendly, brown tabby kitten. Free to good home.
4 comments:
I hope you find a good home! I can't stop laughing over your first line, though: "the summer cat crop"! LOL
If you are interested, you could use have-a-hart traps to catch the feral females to take them to get spayed.
Is this remaining kitten from the batch of seven I found hidden in your hay stack the last time I visited you? How very sad...but the big circle of life and all of that...
Rose -- What a coincidence, someone just told me the other day to try that idea. I have to talk to my vet to see if they would do that. Thanks!
Hi Erin! Thanks for the well wishes.
Karen! Long time no hear! I'm not sure if this was from that litter or not, can't remember. This is one of Zoe's kittens, if that makes it clearer. I do know that most of that litter didn't make it, one day I went out to the barn and saw kitten bits scattered all over. NOT good. Don't know what found them, maybe an opossum or coon. We have both.
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