Owl

Owl, that’s right, Owl not ‘owls’ or ‘barn owl’ or ‘great horned owl’, just Owl, which can only mean one thing…..another damn cat has shown up!  So far only The Teen and My Loving Spouse have caught sight of Owl who has been sleeping on the hay bales in the barn.  I have some grave concerns (down right terror) about this, it was just about this time last year that the 3 extra feral barn cats showed up.

In a blink of an eye we went from 1 cat to 3 cats on purpose and from 3 cats to 6, because…. our farm got ‘marked’ somehow on the feral cat secret farm trail!  Contrary to popular belief I am not a cat person and more cats showing up is my farm nightmare, no wait, that is just a regular nightmare it doesn’t matter where I live!

Getting the 5 cats fixed last year was no easy task.  We had to call in the professionals and in this case, I am grateful for them, yep, that’s right, we needed…. the ‘Extreme Cat People’.  We all know some of the Extreme Cat People, they are the ones that buy the best/expensive cat food, even when it is not on sale, believe cat scratch towers are proper living room decorations, have ‘cat’ decorated tee-shirts, sweat shirts and (if women) earrings.  They even talk to their cats as if… well… as if they were dogs.

The Extreme Cat People here take the ‘fixing’ of feral cats very seriously and let me tell you, these people are organized!  All we had to do was drive around town picking up cat cages from some of them, drive to a nearby town to pick up cat carriers from the others and then deliver the caught cats to the Extreme Cat People at 5:00 am (as in the very early morning) on a Monday to be driven over the hill to the cat fixing clinic.  Imagine the dedication of the Extreme Cat Person who had to drive a dozen cats in a car 80 miles both ways!

Catching the right 3 cats for the first phase of cat fixing, was the night I realized… Ellen, you aren’t living in the city any more, as the 3 cats not slated for fixing were tearing about the living room.  In the end, the right 3 cats were caught, but the cost was high.  My Loving Spouse was not only scratched up, but he’d had to resort to desperate measures, baiting the cat cages with his only can of herring (trust me, if you are English, this was a sacrifice)….and two months later… we’d had to do it again.

We thought we were safe… we had all the cats fixed.  They were/are a mean and tight bunch…My Loving Spouse assured me that our pack of 5 barn cats would now run off any other cats that might show up….  Sheesh…sometimes I hate it when he’s wrong!

PS: For all you cat people… here are some cat photos… of course since they are cats, they are not co-operating, but I’m doing my best.

Tigger and Rabbit

Pooh coming out the cat door and Harvey.

RIP

One of my favorite Extreme Cat People

Lori Mac Donald

5-15-2013