Barn cat
Five years ago, Strider turned up in our barn,
sick and in need of a home. Since then, we've managed just fine
with two cats --- Strider does all the hard work around the farm and
Huckleberry lets us spoil him. But Thursday afternoon, the cat
balance got out of whack.
Another plaintive meow
from the barn turned up this little critter, who is still too scared of
me to let me check its sex. The barn cat looks pretty healthy, but
was starving and quickly downed nearly a quart of dry cat food over the
first 24 hours before starting to slow down to a more normal eating
pace.
I'm not quite sure what
to make of the feline. It meows plaintively at me, begging for
something even when there's still food in its dish, but it's too scared
to come closer than three or four feet away from a human, and that only
when I sit down and look in the other direction.
Two cats in the house is
really more than I can handle, especially when they both want attention
at once. (Mark's more of a dog person.) So Mark and I are
agreed that this little feline wouldn't fit in. But I'm not sure
if I can catch it to give it away, so I'm a little stuck by the cat in
the barn. Does anyone local want a cat in need of serious TLC?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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one way to keep rats down is to have a lot of semi-feral cats that you don't feed. My exwife grew up on a farm. I remember my first trip there in spring, when a tidal wave of cats poured out from under the porch stoop to see who had arrived. They claimed to only feed left overs to the cats. They had no rat problem, even though they raised hogs and kept grain stored in a silo.
Nobody "owns" a barn cat-- they're free spirits who may prefer to make your property their territory. They do quite well outside all year. We have 5 on our 2/3rd ac property and they survived our nasty winter (60 in of snow & 20+ days with sub-zero temps)just fine.
I put out free choice dry cat food and 2 cans of canned food each day (chickens gobble up what the cats leave behind). They are still good mousers because they naturally stalk and catch anything that scurries along the ground like a rodent, even if they're not hungry.