Of Cats & Cows. Part 1

Cats. 
~ by Colette

I never could quite relate to the feline society as a species. Growing up on a farm, we always had anywhere from five to thirty-some cats around.  This reality kinda hardened me to their purposefulness.

With such a large family running around on our eighty acre spread, “The Farm”, as it was called, became a popular place for people to dump off their furry friends.  On more than one occasion I recall finding a young litter of kittens abandoned in our front ditch.  Mind you, people didn’t drive up our long driveway to ask if we wanted them, they just dumped them off, like a “drive-by cattery.”

With so much already for the boys to do, it became our job to care for these critters.  With several milking cows in the barn, we always had leftover milk to share.  I watched a sort of “cat rank” emerge as I carried the table scraps out to the barn.  Though these cats came in many shapes and sizes, they also came with their own personality.  Some were mean, while others docile. The most aggressive ones would jump up on me, attempting to get the tastiest morsel first – Maybe that’s why mom always equipped us with a large spoon or spatula. The others always followed behind single file, as if in some line of protocol.  At the top of the ‘cat rank’ was actually our dog, Spot.  He was smart enough to head straight to the serving area in the barn, well ahead of the cats.  He always got more than his fair share. 

I don’t recall many of these cats as even acquiring names.  By the time we got to know them, they so often disappeared.  There was one grey male cat, however, that I liked named “Raincloud.”  Less rapidly than the rest, Raincloud inevitably met his match during a duel with another feline gang member.  Our efforts to tame kittens usually proved little results as they returned to their call of the wild.

The peak of cat-dom usually came near the end of summer, one particular summer our farm peaked at 32 cats! I often wondered exactly what thoughts Dad had about that many cats around! Certainly there couldn’t have been enough mice to feed that large a brood. After the first frost or so, our cat population diminished to a manageable number.  It was a relief really, to me at the time, to have a few less cats around to feed.

No.  Warm regards and emotional ties for what most consider a pet, wasn’t really instilled in me in.  “Oh, it’s a cat” was more my general muse upon seeing them around our farm. They were more admired in the field of science than they were as pets.  For example, witnessing the wonder of birth and the reality of death.  For the less thoughtful of scientists, cat ‘researchers’ could be seen trying to catch a cat in a net or blanket after throwing it from the haymow, or putting it in a bucket on a rope attached to a pulley, and hoisting it back up to the haymow. Adventure seeking scientists tried a “walk the plank”, attempting to get the cats to walk the high beams in the barn.  At least one cat per year seemed to find itself in the wrong place at the wrong time; deciding to sleep under the hood of the car.  But, I long ago concluded from these experiments that cats do not always “land on their feet,” so I’m careful never to describe myself as such.

Though cats are one animal I never regarded as useful beyond catching an occasional mouse, I expected little more from them but to sit on their haunches and look pensive.  While most of the animals we kept on the farm supplied us with milk, eggs, or meat, the less-than-lovable myriad of cats kept us out of trouble. As we cared for them day after day, our barn yard cats were more like lawn ornaments or fixtures that just came with the farm, like the weeds in the cornfield.