I Love My Barn Cats

By Nat

Love my barn cats! They control the mice and voles here on the farm but once or twice a year they have a nasty encounter with a skunk or a porcupine. I can deal with that but it is the only time I wish they weren’t so ‘tough’.

Barn Cat Guarding Barn
Barn Cat Guarding Barn. Photo by Nat.
Two useful tags. Click either to see the articles: Toxic to cats | Dangers to cats

We have very good barn cats and I love them. Although they are fed and watered in the barn, they sleep everywhere – machine sheds, garage, porch, old wooden granaries, under the trucks, in the hay loft, and under certain trees.

The most fascinating thing to watch them do is when they are teaching the kittens to hunt. The mother will carefully catch a rodent, to keep it alive, so the little ones can practice their skills. Some will say this is cruel but the kittens need to learn this essential survival skill.

My barn cats can go up and down ladders and this seems another skill that is passed on. The cats seem to know the different between small bird species. The swallows, owls and merlins are ignored because the cats know that they are good fliers – but when a warbler or chickadee flies into a building, they are on it like a stink on a skunk.

Two Barn Cats
Two Barn Cats

And speaking of skunks, I think they must believe that they are very smelly cats. Once or twice a year I will find a cat that has tangled with a skunk and yes, tomato juice works. Trying to give a barn cat a tomato scrub is also an event.

When we have a litter of kittens, we usually keep the females – the males are more troublesome and will occasionally kill the little ones. Rarely do we find one that has been hit on the road for they seem to know this danger and treat the road as a boundary.

Our closest neighbors are 3 miles to the south so we are fairly isolated from other cats coming to visit but we still manage to a have a few litters a year. But the hawks, foxes, coyotes do make meals of the cats.

This almost always occurs in the open for barn cats are excellent tree climbers. A snowy winter can also thin out the group but the cats cannot travel across the snow as quick as their predators.

Our cats are most valuable for rodent control – mice will chew the wiring out of any vehicle or machine. And although they cannot take down a porcupine or raccoon – two other building eating menaces – they make great mothers, enjoy our company and live very natural life.

Nat

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19 thoughts on “I Love My Barn Cats”

  1. I so enjoyed reading about your Barn cats you have a wonderful appreciation of them yet you still let them lead the most natural life possible (albeit the blanket in the box hasn’t gone unoticed – a little helping had there perhaps?) 🙂 I also love your barn considering its 100 years old its in amazing condition but I would imagine thats due to the climate there.
    Thanks once again for sharing you have some wonderful cats.

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  2. What a wonderful life for barn cats in that beautiful big barn I love all the pictures and reading about them.
    It’s sad accidents sometimes happen but I think that quality of life is much better than quantity of life and better a short happy free life than a long miserable frustrated one.

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  3. I love that photo. This barn is similar, although bigger, to the one a school friend’s farmer/milkman dad had.
    How we used to love to play in it and cuddle the kittens of the barn cats. Those cats had a really good life. I don’t know of any farms around here with barn cats now even though most people have indoor/outdoor cats, not cats kept indoors always.

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