Schoenecker's Shenanigan's Column: Abondoned fuzzballs

Living on a farm, we have some farm cats. Yes, feral cats that come and go as they please. Sometimes they eat and stay at the neighbors. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they fight. Sometimes they like each other.

All of the cats seem to like each other in the winter time, but not always. I am guessing that is a deep-seated animal-hatred when it is -10˚ Fahrenheit out and a cat doesn’t want to cuddle with their fellow farm neighborhood cats.

Every spring though, the “heat” is on. They get busy getting their groove on. This year’s batch of spring kittens sadly died mid-summer though. The mommy cat was good with them, but they had eye infections that weren’t treated in time, and, frankly, they were really hard to get a hold of when I was able to do so.

Enter — second breeding season! At least one of the mommy cats was able to have two white or siamese kittens. They had beautiful blue eyes, black tails and were noisy.

We have a lamp-heated, built-in hut that cats can go into that my father built into the garage years ago for a dog we used to have. Every fall though, I change out the blanket in there and make sure it is clean. Most of the summer they really don’t use it much.

This year, when I went in there to do the annual cleaning and blanket change, I found the two kittens in there all nice and toasty. I had to temporarily remove them and, of course, pet them some because they were cute. I gave them an antibiotic puffer because I saw their eyes were infected and placed them back in.

Mommy must not have liked the human scent on them and moved them immediately that day. She also started to abandon them. When I noticed this the other day, I put out a call for someone to take them and thankfully an old co-worker friend’s sister took them both.

It seems like they will have a good home now. I didn’t want them to die out in the cold, not being old enough to hunt, learn to eat on their own, and be taken care of in the ways they needed to be.

Let’s hope next breeding season brings a cat or two to keep our farm rodent patrol in check. It’s like boxing season when that happens, the male cats fighting for territory. But there is no better mouse patrol than a cat!

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