I feel a tad stupid writing this post because it seems like a very obvious solution to a very obvious problem. However, it has taken me eight years to come to this realisation.
From my knowledge of The New World, cats were introduced from the Old World by Post Columbian Contact (1490’s). Back in the good old days, cats existed to do a job ie. keep rat populations down and that is why you had a ship’s cat or a larder cat. As far as I know, cats did not exist at that time, exclusively for cuteness and cuddling.
Well, nowadays, cats do exist for cuteness and cuddling and we (and they) have forgotten their ancestral days of work, struggle and rat chasing! Indeed, we have a Millennial Cat!
Okay, so I have a cat on the farm for eight years and he does whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Sometimes, I feel that he has trained us to exist only to feed and cuddle him…I scratch my head and wonder… at what point did the tables turn on us…
(There is a rat running amok in my kitchen eating teabags…why is the cat not doing his job??)
Since it has been raining non-stop, the cat has taken to sleeping in the same spot, at the back of the house, for 23.5 hours of the day. For the 30 minutes of awake time, he is performing cat toilet duties or persuading me to feed him. He sleeps on a black executive chair with an extra layer of cloth for comfort:
Okay, so what do I do? I can’t shout at him and I can’t talk to him…Catch the rat, you stupid lazy good-for-nothing cat!! And besides, he looks too cute to reprimand!
This is what we have done. We have surrounded his executive chair with food that needs protecting. The sack of corn and the dog food is beside him. Any vegetables or fruit, of significance, are placed in his sleeping space. Look, we have our vegetables protected by the cat!
It’s working. No rat dares to come near any of the sacks with a fat cat guarding them. Gnome says that if we need extra security in the kitchen, we can always wheel the executive chair in to that area. So there you go, we now have a pantry cat!
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