Living on a farm, we have cats that live in the barn, shop and other out buildings. We feed them cat food but they are good at catching mice that would take over if they weren’t there. It is fun to watch them play on a nice day and the one black and white cat that is only a year old was having fun climbing up and down off of the large round bale recently on a nice sunny day. Walter, the granddaughters named him, settled down after a while to watch the farmstead from his high perch. Mr. Cat, the yellow and white one and Darkness the black one were enjoying the sunshine streaming in the large door of the shop. I whistled and they both looked at me at the same time….lucky, as cats pretty much do what they want, when they want.
Mr. Cat is a really old cat for being an outside cat. We think he may be approaching 15. He was here when John’s parents lived here and they had him neutered so sadly we have no offspring from him. A lot of times neutered cats are just lazy but that is not the case with Mr. Cat. We see him hunting and with mice or birds all the time. When my in-laws lived here they called him Old Yeller but John couldn’t ever remember his name and when we were remodeling the house before we moved in we brought our daughter and granddaughters over to see what we had done so far. As we drove into the yard he walked across in front of us and the granddaughters immediately asked John what his name was. Without a pause John just said…. “ahhh…Mr. Cat” and Mr. Cat he has been since then.
Darkness got her name from a movie. We had two orphan kittens John was raising in the shop so he named them Ghost and Darkness after the lions in the movie “The Ghost and The Darkness”. (Scary movie by the way.) Ghost disappeared after a year but Darkness has been a shop cat for several years now. She is also neutered as she just didn’t know how to be a mother. She had about 4 litters of kittens and didn’t take care of them from the time they were born….just wandered off and they died right away. We didn’t want her to keep having kittens so had her fixed. Sometimes kittens that are hand raised just don’t learn some of the instincts they should have so mother love is important in the cat world too.
We got Walter’s mother, Olivia named by the granddaughters, from a gal in town and the kittens we brought home with us all died but Olivia stayed….think the kittens were all sick when we brought them home and very wild so we couldn’t catch them, were supposed to be tame . Last
spring she had another batch of kittens and they sure are pretty and are pretty tame. The granddaughters were here soon after so again they named them all for us. John and I kept forgetting what they named some of them so at Christmas “D” made us a cheat sheet using a pink marker and even drew cat faces to show the markings. She couldn’t see why we could forget their names. I have kept that near the kitchen window and now think I remember them. Love her spelling! Walter is really tame and the others are in degrees tame. They all know John as he is the one that feeds them….actually he looks like the Pied Piper in the morning as they are close to the house and follow him to the barn as fast as they can go.Lynn
1 comment:
Hello Lynn
Just happened upon your blog this morning and enjoyed your post on your cats. About 3 years ago I picked up a 4 month old kitten, Charlie, from the RSPCA. He had been taken from his mother at an extremely early age and had no proper cat instincts or behaviour. Our old boss cat, Scuffy, a fixed male started mothering him and today Charlie is a beautifully behaved boy. Scuff takes his duties seriously and breaks up any fights between Charlie and Tigger, Scruff's brother. Last week Charlie caught a bunny, a feral pest over here in Australia, and took it straight to Scruff and offered it to him. Just amazing to watch.
Well I'm off to tidy up my sewing room which is in a pretty disastrous state. I'm picking up a new workbench this week so looking forward to that.
Jenn
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