A Mixed Blessing. That's what J calls having farm cats. They are a joy to us but we experience such grief when we lose them. And the loss is inevitable.
My brother felt we needed farm cats, like we had years ago, to keep the rodent population down in the farm buildings. In October he brought over a mama and five 7-week-old kittens given to us by a family that had too many cats.
"Farm cats" are not supposed to be pets, we knew we shouldn't get attached to them, but we are such softies. Even my sister-in-law, who thought she did not like cats, was smitten by these five little bundles of fur. When they came to visit, she would scoop up two or three of them and say "aren't they cute?" J quickly became especially attached to them. His mother allowed no pets when he was growing up; his first experience with being around animals and sharing a home with them was when he married Chloe and me (more about that later.) He has taken on the daily responsibility of going out to the former chicken coop which has been converted to a cat coop, to fill the food and water dishes. Before they go in to eat, they all line up to be picked up and cuddled, one at a time. Butterfly, Butterscotch, Buttercup, Buster Brown, and Ruffles.
In three months we have lost three of the six, and it broke our hearts every time.
We lost the mama within the first week. She came up to the house severely injured, apparently having nearly lost a fight with something vicious. She only lived a few more days. There was nothing we could do. Farm cats generally do not get vet visits; it is too expensive, and they would have just had to expedite what was coming anyway. Thus we found ourselves with five motherless two-month-old kittens. We had planned on supplementing the mothercat's hunted food with commercial catfood, at least until the kittens were old enough to hunt on their own. Now we had to fill that dish every day.
J commented on how fast the food was going down, considering it was for five little kittens. We became suspicious that something else was getting a free lunch, so my brother set up a camera in the coop to catch the culprit on film, and it worked. We found several photos of raccoons helping themselves to the catfood! At least one of the kittens sat and watched, and in one photo, joined them at the dish.
One of the raccoons, his tummy full, decided this was a good place to lie down and have an after dinner nap.
The photos made several things clear. We now knew not only where the catfood was going, but what had attacked the mothercat. She must have been trying to defend the food dish from these intruders. The other clarification was the reason for the strange sound Ruffles had started making. We thought at first she had a respiratory problem, but she seemed to be healthy otherwise. She was making a very loud, chirrupy sound, in addition to her purring, that can be heard way across the yard. After we saw the photos, it hit us: she was making a raccoon sound! We think she is the one in the photos eating at the same dish as the raccoons, as her markings are different than the others. Her name was amended to "Ruffles the Raccoon Cat."
Chicken coops have little chicken-sized doorways, low to the ground; the one used by the kittens now has a board nailed over most of it to make it too small for raccoons to enter.
Even without a mother, the kittens grew and thrived, except for one. We nicknamed Buttercup "Tiny" because she was noticeably smaller than the others. It may have been something congenital. Just before Christmas she just went to sleep next to the food dish and did not wake up. J buried her next to her mama behind the coop. As with the loss of the mothercat, we felt sad but accepted it as part of life on the farm.
The second week of January we found Butterfly. He was the most outgoing, adventurous one, always in the lead no matter what was going on. We think he was starting to go out hunting on his own, but without his mama to teach him to watch out on the road. In his experience, everyone watched out for him. No one told him about the farmers who barrel past here in their grain trucks. We had a much more difficult time accepting this loss. All of us shed tears for him.
The three remaining cats are doing well, and growing fast; none of them can be called kittens anymore.
I worried about their survival during the coldest part of the winter. In the past, when we had farm cats, they lived in the barn with the cows who, frankly, put out a lot of body heat. There are no cows, not even the barn is standing now. These cats have a cavern of hay bales my brother arranged for them inside the coop, and I lined it with the bathroom mats from our old house. It must be enough; even on the bitter cold mornings they come up to the house, alert and playful.
The Cat Goddess must have noted our grief over these losses and sent a stray to boost our diminishing cat population. This week Mom thought she saw a white cat out in the yard. J went out to see if he could get closer. He called “kitty-kitty” and the cat approached him, but so did the Three Mousecateers, and the stray ran back to the edge of the woods. J herded them into their coop and closed off their exit with a piece of plywood, just for a little while. With those three temporarily removed from the situation, the stray came back closer to the house. She hungrily accepted food and water, and then got up in J’s lap for some cuddling.
She was obviously someone’s pet but unlikely to belong to a neighbor. We get visits from neighbor cats who might be looking for a handout but are not hungry like this one. We suspect she is a “drop off.” Around here, people drop off unwanted dogs and cats near farms, in hopes they will find a new home. In this case it worked. She has come back three more days for food, water and snuggles. She seems to be working out a non-aggression treaty with the other three cats.
Mom named her Snowball.
Once again we are saying to each other, “We shouldn’t get attached.”
