I know full well and fully appreciate that many of the people involved in this and other Boards actually like cats. I generally like cats, too. In their place. I don’t like cats in my place. I flatter myself that I am a kind and humane person. This, however, has gone too far. I’ve had enough and I’m not going to take it any more.
My wife and I live on a farmette, some 20 acres of pasture and woods with our house and a collection of obsolete farm buildings. We keep a couple of horses that belonged to our now adult children, a retired milking goat and a troop of semi-feral cats along with the usual assembly of woodland creatures and birds. It is a lovely place to live for the six months it isn’t winter. The cats have become a major complicating factor in my life. Mrs. Gelding loves cats. It is reported that her first word was"Kitty." She has made friends with some of the barn cats to the end that some of them have been transformed into backdoor cats. They hang around the back door and beg for food, yowling their demands whenever a human appears in sight. One tabby in particular has become Mrs.G.'s particular friend and condescends to be petted.
This particular tabby is wonderfully fertile but she is also a highly incompetent mother. She seems to have two or three litters every year but so far as I can tell she has managed only to raise one kitten per litter, at best, to feline adolescence. The poor beast’s biggest problem is that she keeps having kittens in the dead of winter.
This last March, as the back door tabby was working up to still another tri-annual blessed event, Mrs. G. got it in her head that the thing to do was to close the tabby in the heated garage, thus converting it into a cat nursery to keep mother and young safe from weather and prowling tom cats. All went well until April when the tabby whelped four kittens, one crippled. Its hind legs were on backwards. Cute little guys.
Now, however, the kittens are beginning to play around the garage and the tabby shows no inclination to move her little family to the barn where nature intended them to live. She shows no indication that she will undertake to support her little family by catching mice and other vermin, or teach the family trade to the little nippers. She seems to be content to laze about the garage, eating commercial cat food and defecating in the corners. In short, the tabby has become the cat version of the fabled welfare queen. The mother cat’s disinclination to earn a living outside of my garage is not my problem.
My problem is that the kittens have usurped the garage’s legitimate function as a shelter for automobiles. This past Tuesday Mrs. G. Had to go to work early, so she got first shot at the hot water. I was just getting into the shower (don’t think about this, it is not a pretty thought), when a choirs of horn honking started in the garage, followed by Mrs. G. screaming for help. Putting on my bathrobe, I went out to the garage to find my wife in a perfect dither. The kittens had chosen this of all days to be kittenish. When Mrs. G. appeared in the garage they had all run under her car and hidden and would not come out. My job, I was told, was to crawl under the car and flush out the kittens. The tabby had chosen this time to go off looking ing for a fresh impregnation and was of no help in gathering the young to a place of safety.
So, ever the obedient husband, I clambered under the car and fetched out two of the three kittens that had managed to survive to the age of five weeks. There was no sign of the third even though Mrs. G. was sure that all three had skittered under the car. After some five or ten minutes of singing “kitty, kitty, kitty” and beating on the car tires with a broom stick to flush out the recalcitrant last kitten, we gave up and Mrs. G.commenced backing her car out of the garage in four inch increments. After some ten feet of this rearward lurching the third kitten appeared under the left rear tire. The kitten screeched, I bellowed, and Mrs. G. stood on the breaks. Carefully, Mrs. G. slipped the car into neutral. Laboriously, I climbed under the car and physically rolled it off the cat, which was pinned by a hind paw. In one smooth motion the kitten sank its darling little milk teeth into the web between the thumb and fore finger of my right hand. Convulsively I grabbed the cat, pulled it free and repressed the instinct to strangle the little dear right then and there. The kitten ran off into the bushes and I crawled out from underneath the car.
At this point Mrs. G. was just about hysterical. Mother tabby was still out pursuing a frolic of her own, two kittens were under the steps and the wounded kitten was in the bushes with eight lives to go. I was throughly out of sorts, quietly seeping my life’s blood and indecently clothed because my bath robe was entangled in the car’s rear suspension. Mrs. G. was too upset to drive her car, fearing that some other cat was hiding in the wheel well, so she took my car. This meant that I have to drive her car. I can’t smoke in her car and God knows I needed a smoke. It was too early in the day to drink.
I came home in the evening to find the tabby providing lunch to the three kittens. The dummy seems no worse for wear although a little gimpy in one leg. None of the cats seem the least bit appreciative of my heroics of a mere eight hours before. All the cats appear to be just fine today, thank you. They are having a great time skittering around the garage, eating commercial food and defecating in the corners. We are parking the cars in the drive way. I can only hope that these creatures move to the barn before the fruits of the tabby’s latest fling see the light of day.
Look. I’m not looking for any advice or sympathy on this thing. All I want is the chance to vent a little and perhaps receive the support of someone who thinks that it is just possible that cats are not the dearest creatures in all of God’s great creation.