Free Loaders

These are photos of my two, free loaders that actually have been enjoying the summer on the farm! When I come back (in another life) I want to come back as one of the cats in my family...imagine getting to lay on a plant stand, on a shaded veranda all summer long, the smells of mint, oregano and thyme perfuming the air, hummingbirds flitting overhead to the feeder and nothing at all to do but sleep and laze around. Someone feeds you breakfast, a little morning nap, watch a few hummingbirds for entertainment (don't bother to even try and chase them, as you know that lunch will be served later on), an afternoon nap, groom yourself a little, stretch to get the kinks out and then have a late afternoon nap. What a life!

Sylvester and Marmalade came to live with us because they knew that life was easy around here. Sylvester was actually Marcie's, but she could not take him to college, he was not a street wise city cat, so he came to live with us last September when Marcie enrolled in accounting at LCC. Marmalade was a little kitten that Megan and Katrina found on a roadside when they were reading meters for Alta Gas. They took pity on him, as he was pretty small and saved him by bringing him home.

I don't know why people feel the need to bring all stray animals to our farm, but they keep coming! Res (my dog) was brought home by Daniel, after he was found wandering in a field on the Brocket Indian reservation (get it? Res is short for reservation!). Daniel just never came back and got him and he became very attached to me. We finally paid to get him neutered, then paid about $400.00 to get all of the porcupine quills removed from his mouth and throat when he attacked a porcupine. (Stupid ____ dog!) One day I had enough, and tied into Daniel when he showed up, demanding that at least he could buy some dog food if he expected us to look after his dog. The next day Daniel showed up with a GIANT bag of dog food and dumped it on the porch floor with a scowl. "Is that good enough?" he growled. Imagine my surprise when at the end of the month, I got our bill from the Co-op and he had charged the dog food to us!!! Seriously! From that point on, I considered Res to be "our" dog, knowing full well that Daniel was never going to accept responsibility for him.

Our last free loader is Rex, our old farm dog - really, really old farm dog. As a pup, she had a bad habit of chasing and killing cats. We tried everything to break her from her killing cats. Nothing worked. Until someone told us that maybe she could be trained in the same manner that farm dogs were trained when they were chicken killers. "Tie the dead cat to her collar" my Uncle Vic instructed me. Let the cat stay there until she can't stand the smell. (At this point I was desperate and so I thought it was worth a try - as disgusting as that sounds). So, the next time that Rex killed two of our black kittens (not little ones, but lanky adolescent cats) Daniel and I got some rope and tied the two cats to her collar. We only made one miscalculation. We left the rope a little too long and there was some "lead" in the rope. When Rex moved around, the cats would sort of "flop". We did it in the evening, thinking that by the next evening, we could release the cats and bury them. What we didn't plan on was the Swanns ice cream man to make his monthly appearance.

So imagine this scene... Rex really likes the Swanns man, because he always gave her treats. She is jumping around his van, anxiously awaiting her reward and the two, black, stone cold, dead cats are flipping and flopping around with every jump that Rex makes. Just enough slack in the rope to make them flop really good with every jump. I realize what is happening, rush to the door to try and call the dog off...the Swanns man takes one look at Rex, with two dead cats flopping all over, puts his van in reverse, speeds out of the driveway and NEVER COMES BACK!!! I am sure that he thought that were the hill billiest, red necked, cat haters that he had ever met. Luckily for me, no police or SPCA agents ever came to haul us off for cat abuse.

The end of the story, Rex is now 18 human years old and those two, black kittens were the last cats that she ever killed and we never got ice cream delivered to our door again! We are probably written up in some "incident" report and black listed from home deliveries for eternity!