Cats

We currently have four cats.  The number has been higher or lower though the years but four is the number for right now.  Three females and one male.  Keeper, a long haired calico was sitting on our front porch the day we moved into this house.  She was a just a tiny tuft of fur.  Cami and Tilly are the next youngest and came from the same litter from my son's parents-in-law's barn.  Pedy, our only male cat, has done some reporting for this blog although I haven't been able to entice him to go back to that job. Pedy is the youngest of the current group.  All the cats have been neutered so no kittens for us.  When we need an additional cat, one always appears.

Karma is a bitch.  Keeper was full grown and very full of herself when Cami and Tilly arrived.  She was not very nice to them, beating them up at every opportunity, pushing them off their feed bowls, hissing and yowling.  Now that they are full grown and full of themselves and Keeper is getting older, they are not very nice to her in pretty much the same way.  Pedy arrived completely full of himself and wasn't very nice to any of the other cats.  He is happy to try to back any and all of them off their feed and will happily pick a fight with any of them if he can.  Understandably, none of them are very nice to him either.  Feeding them can be very interesting.  They each eat in their own spot but the order they arrive on the front porch seems to completely control how calm or not the meal is.  My husband Ron is the cat person and loves to feed them.  

Each cat has his or her favorite spot to lounge during the day.  Pedy is most often in the barn, usually high up on the hay although he has also been spotted in the swale on the lid of the cushion container on the back porch. Tilly and Cami don't seem to need to hide so they take over the chairs on the front porch.  

Keeper found the perfect place to hide and watch and lounge in one of our Satsuma orange trees at the end of the front porch.  It was perfectly hidden but provided a great vantage point and was close to meals on the front porch.  Then the freeze happened and we lost all the leaves on the Satsuma trees.  Suddenly her hidey hole became visible.

As I said before, Ron is the one who feeds the cats.  He knows just where each one wants to eat, who prefers being up on the railing, who wants to be under his chair.  And he sits out there with his iPad enjoying the morning and evening while they eat.  He will gladly wait for those who are late to arrive and carefully picks up any leftover feed and the cat's bowls when they are finished.  I'm afraid I'm not nearly as gracious.  When Ron isn't here to feed the cats, like earlier this month when he was having his knee replacement, it was up to me.  I did feed the cats.  Every day.  But did I sit out there with them?  Nope.  Not my job.  I think the cats are just as happy to have Ron home as I am.

We frequently have visitor cats who try to run our cats off their feed.  There seem to be quite a few feral cats out this way.  Some look fairly healthy and looked after so maybe they aren't feral but are visiting us from our neighbors.  Others look unhealthy and sort of battered by a hard life on their own.  Pedy protected us from one of the visitors a couple of weeks ago.  The fight was on again off again over three nights with horrible yowling and hissing, screaming and tearing around.  I went out a couple of times to try to break up the fight, a nearly impossible task, only to find them 30 feet up in the trees. Pedy ended up on a week of antibiotics with puncture wounds spread out all over his body.  It was a hard won battle but we haven't seen that visitor cat back since.