7 Cats on the Farm

Input from Jeanie Bein, Elly Roselle and Leila Kemery.

Farm cats and door yard cats are two different things. Farm cats have a function while door yard cats are scavengers.

Farm cats fill a niche on the farm by controlling the rodent population. These feral cats did not feel safe around humans and would bite and claw if someone was able to grab one of them. My sister Jeanie would find the nests where these semi-wild cats kept their kittens and would tame them.

                    Feral cat in a flower bed. Photo by Rick Bein 2020. 

These kittens would grow up accustomed to people. Over a time, many the door yard cats accumulated outside the back door of our house to become parasitically addicted to the table scraps that we threw out the back door. We had to be careful not to let the cats enter. They would hang around the milking parlor and lick up stray squirts of milk. We had fun watching the cats catch a stream of milk squirted directly from the cow’s teat. After milking we would always pour some of the fresh milk into a pan for the cats. On occasion my mother would offer the cats some milk and extra food back at the house.

What is a “door yard” cat?  Well, it somewhere between a house cat that lives in people’s homes and is doted on by its humans, and a feral cat (maybe called an alley cat) that lives in the wild but frequently on the periphery of human settlements. Door yard cats do not hunt for mice, have a range of familiarity with humans, but are dependent on people for food. We normally had between 20 and 30 cats that fit this description. Our mother would not let us bring them into our house.

My sister Jeanie was fascinated by the door yard cats and played with them constantly.

Once when she was three years old, she followed a cat through a fence into a cattle corral and on to the crust of dried manure that had formed over a deep boggy spot. The manure crust was strong enough to support the weight of the cat, but not Jeanie. She immediately sank into the manure. Fortunately, it was only neck deep and she was able to keep her head above the muck. She could not move as she struggled to get free. It would have been a small matter of time before she would lose her strength, fall over, sink, and drown.

Fortunately, the curious cattle came to watch her in her struggle. My father who happened by, noticed the cattle circled around the manure hole and went to see what was happening. To his horror he found his daughter immersed in slime. Dad pulled her out and brought the tar baby to the hydrant and hosed her off before taking her to the bathtub. He asked her how she got into this predicament, and she answered, “I chase the kitty.”  The cat had walked across the crusted manure while she sank. Jeanie barely remembers this incident today.

Jeanie would dress the cats in her doll´s clothes. The cats became her dolls, a much better alternative since they were alive, and they seemed to listen when she talked to them. The dolls had long been discarded, but their clothes were invaluable.

                 Cat dressed doll clothes. Photo by Leila Bein 2020.

The cats did not seem to mind the clothes; however, the elastic waist bands did not give them much choice. She often forgot the cats had clothes on them. One cat used up one of its nine lives when Jeanie left it in a cupboard for ten days before someone found it. The cat’s tail had become enmeshed in its own feces which had hardened into a large accumulating ball inside the doll pants. My mother had to cut the mess off the cat and shave its tail.

I remember trying to teach the cats to swim in the cattle watering tank. Although the cats could swim, they did not appreciate that particular activity. Dad and I had a long dialogue and he was not happy about my experiment.

Jeanie made cat motels by cutting doors in cardboard boxes and connecting them so the cats could walk from inside one box to another.  I helped her with this. We had to learn to make the windows small enough so that the cats could not escape.  She gave names to all the cats: Mrs. Goldie, Fuzzy Wuzzy, and Guzzy Buzzy were among the orange cats. I remember “Kitty Cookie,” another orange female cat.

Betsy was a favorite name reserved for the calico cats and we had Betsy 1, Betsy 2, Betsy 3 and so forth. Mrs. Wildly was one of the more prolific semi-wild long haired female cats who moved her kittens on a regular basis to keep Jeanie from finding them. Then Jeanie started bringing the kittens to the back yard, but there was no way for them to nurse. That was a problem until one of our cats who was barron began to lactate when the kittens nuzzled her. Jeanie named her “bosomy”. The feral tomcats managed to keep the dooryard female cats pregnant.  The dooryard cat population reached close to 30 at times.

One tomcat that gathered our attention was Captain Kidd, a very scrappy, feral, scarred warrior with one eye.  He was easy to remember by the way he looked and for the fact that he would occasionally come to the barn for milk. There he kept his distance, until once when Jeanie used the opportunity to try to pet him.  He streaked away, never to be seen again.

The tomcats that Jeanie tamed remained in the back yard until they chose not to be a dooryard cats anymore and sought the call of the wild. Then we would see them only seasonally. At that time, they had only one thing on their minds.

When Jeanie reached junior high school, she began experimenting by breeding rare pink cats that somehow emerged from the gene pool on the farm. These were rather rare but also fragile. She would bring one of the returning tomcats and confine it with the young pink females hoping to establish a new breed. Unfortunately, none of these females ever conceived.

I remember times when it was difficult getting down the back steps without stepping on a cat. When the back door opened all the dooryard cats in the vicinity would rush to compete for whatever table scraps might be tossed out. Once when I was in a great hurry, I dashed out the back door leaping down the steps before I looked, and in midair I could not see an empty space to place my foot. My foot landed somewhere on the third step, and it crushed one kitten to death. I was mortified and, after that, I chose not to be in such a hurry going down those steps.

                                                    Me and some cats on the back step. Photo by Jean H. Bein 1951.

There seemed to be a carrying capacity of about 20 dooryard cats supported by the table scraps. When the cat population exceeded this number, an epidemic of distemper would attack and many of the cats died.  Dad tried to control the cat’s diseases by giving them penicillin shots. I would hold the cats while he injected them. On one occasion, he missed, and I received the injection in my hand. That produced a small sore that joined the many cat scratches that I had accumulated. You guess it, I never got distemper either!

With the sick ones, who were sneezing, he would euthanize them so that they would not infect the healthy ones. When I became 10 it became my job to kill those sick cats. Dad turned over the 22 rifle for me to carry out my new duty.

That was a very difficult thing for me to do. I remember the first time I did this I cried, and I felt like a murderer and tried to make it up to the cat by giving it a decent burial. I dug a grave out in a nearby crop field and marked it with a cardboard box with a cross and some wildflowers placed in a vase. I was sure that cat was a good Christian.  The grave did not last long though as it was plowed under in the next farming process.

My mother had a rule: “no cats in the house”. But we were once given a pair of Siamese pure-bred cats that were allowed to stay in the house.  “White Treelimb”, our younger sister Elly’s cat, was also allowed in the house. White Treelimb was sort of a “cat of royalty” since she was half Siamese.

One time I trapped one of the feral cats and brought it into the house thinking I could tame it. When I released the cat, it went into a panic and dashed for the window but only crashed on the hard glass. Then it jumped on the curtains and up to the curtain rods which gave way and fell to the floor. Then it jumped on the mantle over the fireplace and knocked off my mother’s favorite vases which broke on the floor. In a matter of seconds, the cat had created havoc far beyond what I could imagine! I ran to the door, opened it and the cat dashed out leaving a horrible mess. The house was literally trashed, and I knew I was in trouble. I tried to clean up the mess by putting the curtains back up and straightening the picture frames, but I could do nothing about the broken vase that had been on the mantle. When Mom came home, I was grounded for weeks.

Mom’s dislike for cats in the house became more pronounced after that. This upset Jeanie who decided to do one better than I.  To get her revenge she caught all the cats she could, about 20, both tame and semi-feral, and brought them into the house when Mom was gone.  When Mom returned, she was quite distraught, grabbed a broom to chase the cats, and in her native north Florida southern drawl yelled “Scat Cat!”  The door was open so they could run out, which a few did.  The rest were utterly terrified and confused and climbed the curtains and knocked things down. (This certainly gave credence to the cliché, “herding cats.”) Mom was sure I had done that one too, but when Jeanie repeated the event two weeks later, I was off the hook.

My piano teacher came out one time and we gave her one of the kittens. Of course, her treatment of that kitten was quite different from those on the farm. This kitten was given all kinds of vitamins and the best diet a cat could have. It was vaccinated for every possible disease; had all kinds of cat toys and the like and slept in her bed. It was not long before that house cat became three times the size of its siblings back on the farm. When her cat died years later, she mourned far more than when her husband died.

As an adult, I never went out of my way to keep cats in an urban setting. However, on one occasion while living in Khartoum, Sudan a cat was given to my children by an embassy employee who found that he could not take it back to the USA.  Frosty had been adopted as a kitten from the streets. When the embassy guy had to return home to the States, he didn’t want to release the cat back to the street, so he convinced my children that they should keep him.

Frosty had been treated like an American house cat. He had been neutered, vaccinated and given all sorts of honorable treatment. Frosty was also deaf, which also meant that he would not be able survive in the wild.

We tried to give Frosty a decent life, but we were unable to keep him separated from the feral street cats that from time to time invaded our walled home. These tomcats would beat on Frosty, shredding his ears, biting and bruising him on a regular basis. The University of Khartoum where I taught, loaned me a cat trap and I caught a series of these cats over a year. Once in the trap, I would take them over across the Blue Nile into Khartoum proper and release them beside one mosque where dozens of feral cats inhabited the walls. That seemed to work since I never caught the same cat twice.

Outside our walls was an area that was under construction and new houses were slowly being built. Months would go by as small additions were made. Caretakers would camp out on these properties living in near poverty situations. I would occasionally speak to whoever was around.

On one occasion the local resident remarked in Arabic to me that the white cat that lived with us actually ate better than he and his family. That was a rather sobering conversation. About a week later Frosty disappeared. I am sure that he ended up in one of the stew pots in the neighborhood.