Cats
One of the most important animals on the homestead is the barn cat; we got five of them the first summer we moved to our homestead on a full time basis. We started with four males and a female, all intact. With four to one you would think that the female would have had us a great pile of kittens. But in the two summers we have had them we have been blessed with one live kitten. The little female never took to mothering she would have a few, hide them well but then forget to feed them. She just would not mother her kittens, and so we had about give up on her. The males started spraying so I had to cut them - that fixed that problem. I thought that should slow the little female down from having more kittens but it didn’t. They managed to get her into kitten the day before they got fixed.
It was a complete surprise to us the day we came home from having our third daughter - the cat came running into the house with a live kitten in her mouth. My first thought was “How long will this one last?” She put it in the box I had setup for her (the last attempted batch of kittens) in the corner out of the way. She seemed to be spending a lot of time with the kitten, and she moved it around the house a few times before settling on a spot. She had me move her box next to the computer desk; she brings her kitten out into the middle of the floor to nurse it. Now my wife and the cat both nurse their new babies together. My wife looks over at the mother cat and smiles and the cat looks up at my wife and smiles. So all is well with the cats now, all I have do is hope that after she raises this one she will be able to find an intact male to get more kittens from and then we might be blessed with more then just one kitten at a time.
