This Land, This Life, This Farmer's Wife: 30 Days of Thankfulness on the Family Farm-Day 14

Day 14-The Circle of Life on the Farm

Imagine pulling in to the driveway and seeing this every day. The cutest white cats the world has to offer.

I’ve talked about our mama cat, Snowball in previous posts. She is a super mama. She has 2-3 litters of kittens every year and has even fostered a litter for a neighbor. She is loving and nurturing and she is firm when she needs to be. Often when she is weaning kittens, she is pregnant (glorious!) When the kittens try to nurse, she gets a testy. HSSSS and swat! I know the feeling Snowy. Git them kids away! Mama has had it! Snowball is a great mouser as well as a great mother. In fact, I just found a mouse yesterday that she probably took care of! We need mousers here. This place would be crawling with rodents if we didn’t have cats around. In fact, recently my father-in-law was asking me how many cats we had, because it’s mouse season and our cat population is a little low.

Luckily, just today I found Snowball’s most recent litter. She had them in an old barrel in the shop. She is always happy to share them with me. I get to love on them before their eyes are open! Here are our current farm cat stats:

Kittens: 2 white, 1 grey, 1 white/tabby---2 females, 2 males

Big Cats: 4 white, 3 females, 1 male

Total Cats: 8 total, 6 white, 2 not white, 5 females, 3 males

I keep track of the important stuff around here, I know you can all tell!

I’m thankful that my kids get to see the circle of life here on the farm, though I feel like they are getting a little hardened to it all. They rarely name the farm cats anymore, and taming them isn’t always a priority. Wild kittens are better for the mouse population anyway. The coyote population and natural selection seem to keep our cat population around 5-7 most of the time. However, we have been up to as many as 18. That was the “Summer of the Cat.”

During the “Summer of the Cat,” it became obvious this farm is too small for that many cats and weird, strange, murky, mean stuff was brewing that summer I tell ya. You could cut the tension with a knife over in the cattle barn where the tom cats prowled.

The kids see the cute white kittens frolicking on the patio, but they also see the other end, the kitten they named and fell in love with disappears and is never to be seen again. They will grow up with a different picture of what a pet cat is than I did growing up in town. Town cats are house cats, they lounged in our living room window and lived in our homes for what seemed like most of my childhood. They were fat, they ate from a can. Farm cats come and go, they are skinny, they eat mice and dog food and sleep in the hay. I think I’d rather be a house cat, how about you?! Yikes.