Cats, Cats, and More Cats

Last summer, a small gray cat showed up at our place. I didn't feed her but she just stayed on. My father-in-law stayed for a month with us and as he likes cats, he made friendly overtures to her and now she is somewhat domesticated. She likes to hang out in the kitchen and wind herself annoyingly around my legs while I'm working. I'm not a cat lover. I enjoy having sheep in my kitchen rubbing up against my legs, but I can't stand it when cats do it.

Somehow, somewhere, this female cat met up with a male cat their rendevous resulted in her giving birth to some kittens. How many, I don't know because she kept them hidden. But she had at least two because now there are three adult cats on the farm all of which look similar. The original cat also has two more very cute small kittens which she is nursing now. In the morning, the kittens come out of their hiding in the barn. I can see them from the house windows. If they see me they run back into the barn. They are very funny to watch as they jump off the remains of a high cement foundation into the tall weeds.

We had looked into getting the cat fixed in December, but we were told that the cost was 200 Euros ($250) per female cat. And so we decided to forgo the operation. I advocated for saving the money and going "natural" with the cats. When I was a kid I lived on a farm and we never spayed or fed the cats. We needed lots of cats to eat all the mice in the out-buildings. And lots of cats would be killed off by other animals like stray dogs or foxes. Here in Belaye, there are lots of stray dogs and foxes. Although I think that the cats here can avoid being killed by escaping into the small holes they use to get into the barns because I haven't come across the remains of any dead cats.

At the present time there are five or six cats on the property. Maybe there are more. There could be twenty . . . that was Monsieur Reste's estimate. I haven't seen any mice, except for some mice heads I found in the barn. But even my mouse problem in the house seems to have stopped (I have bees instead. They took over a bathroom yesterday.) So I do give credit to the cats for having solved the mouse infestation.

Monsieur Reste, the former owner and former caretaker, liked cats and so he insisted that we buy hundreds of Euros of cat food to tide the cats over through the fall and winter. Craig wants me to stop feeding the cats so they will remain wild and leave us alone. Craig is allergic to cats. But it's hard to ignore the cats because the orginal cat, the one my father-in-law domesticated, acts as a representative for all the other cats and when they run out of food, she comes to the house to get my attention, and I find it impossible to ignore her.

The bottom floor of our house has French doors which open to the outside and I keep them open. To my annoyance, the cat wanders into the kitchen whenever she pleases. Preston commented the other day that the cat is a good cat because she only goes into the kitchen. She doesn't go into any of the other rooms.

Yesterday, my friend Philippe David dropped by, he was making a sales call in Prayssac for his lighting fixtures company, and he took me into town for a pizza. I locked up the house.

When I returned and walked in the front door, there was the cat. I moaned, figuring that she had probably clawed my "new" antique chairs in the living room to pieces, or urinated on one of the Persian rugs, or pooped somewhere. I made a quick inspection of the downstairs and gratefully found nothing disgusting.

Later when I was painting upstairs, I went into Preston's bedroom to get a floor lamp for more illumination (he's in Toulouse) and there was a foul smell. The cat had pooped on top of his bedspread. Well, at least that was better than clawing the furniture or peeing on a rug. I could easily wash the bedspread.

But even though she performed the lesser of many evils, now I'm really unhappy with the cat. She was tolerable when she stayed in the kitchen. But now she's pooping upstairs. And to make matters worse, her son and daughter were copulating outside in the yard last night. Not a pleasant sight . . . or sound. The mother cat watched the sorry episode for a few moments then got up and jumped on the back of her son, clawing him. He stopped humping briefly but quickly regained his footing. The mother, resigned to the fact that the son was incorrigble, laid back down and enjoyed the evening singing of the birds and the croaking of the frogs as her son expressed his feelings towards his sister who was howling in a most mournful manner, yet who mysteriously laid there looking peaceful on the ground.

I watched for a few minutes, as a lesson in biology, for I have never seen cats copulating. I had always heard them when I was a kid on the farm, but didn't quite know what was going on. The act sounds like a human baby being murdered so it was always a frightening event for me, I would cower under my bedcovers. So I have to admit I was interested. And I don't have television here at the Moulin, so it was a momentary diversion for the evening.

But then I started to make moral judgements, "yuck, a brother screwing his sister," and being bothered by the cats' lack of class, I turned away to continue with my painting as the screaming continued.

A neighbor suggested that I put the cats on a monthly birthcontrol pill. Too bad I didn't do that last month.