Hey, guys!! Phew…it has been sooo hot!! Dry season may have started. It’s that time of the year again. Anyway, I have a funny story from the farm!
The story started with Cat Trouble which involved our big fat farm cat. Here is a picture of him to remind you of who we are talking about:
He sleeps a lot and he does usually look like this most of the time. The last week or so, he has been wide awake and acting all squirrelly. It was like he had taken a big gulp of coffee and he couldn’t sleep for days. Mostly, he was pacing up and down, pawing at doors to get out of the house (or get into the house). He was agitated and antsy and a pain in the neck!! At first, Sherlock Gnomes thought it was due to the maturing new cat (Crazy Cat) whom we hadn’t fixed yet. Crazy Cat is now about 4 times the size of the picture below with biggish balls (if you pardon my language).
Sherlock Gnomes: ‘…Hmmm, it might be the testosterone that the cat is producing that is bothering Big Cat…’
Okay, since there was so much silly nonsense going on with big farm cat, we got Crazy Cat fixed straight away. Okay done…oh, but big cat is still behaving the same…what’s going on??
Let’s now bring in another story that was happening about the same time. I lost my last piece of Christmas ham!! I left it defrosting over-night in the kitchen sink. For the purposes of this story, it is important to realise that our kitchen is on the veranda which is opened out with no walls or screening and has been like this for about 5 years. I have never had any pilfering so this was the first time. I woke up in the morning to a completely decimated piece of ham on the sink…something ate 1kg (2 lbs) of salty meat in one sitting. My first culprit was our Big Cat….which surprised me because he never (ever) jumps up on table tops to steal food…not in the 10 years that we have had him! However, since he had been acting ‘out of sorts’ lately I thought that he was a likely candidate.
Anyway, if you have ever tried talking to cat in a reasonable manner, you will know that you don’t get anywhere with that sort of talk. Sherlock Gnomes inspected his abdominal area for signs of stolen ham:
Sherlock Gnomes: ‘…Hmmm…it does not feel like he has consumed 1kg of ham…’
So, maybe it wasn’t him?? Who was it?? The other two kittens are still too small to jump onto this veranda…also, Big Cat is still acting weird…what’s going on!!
We decided after much deliberation with a couple of cups of tea that we could possibly have a possum thief. It is possum time again…
So, we set out traps with fried chicken bones (we have found that 10 out of 10 animals love fried chicken!). We made sure to put a few out so that even if we caught our cat, there would still be a trap left over to get the possum.
What do we find the next morning??? Drum roll please: what did we catch?? A Big Orange Cat…but not OUR big cat. Another male cat!!
The Case of the Antsy Cat and The Case of the Stolen Ham had been solved by the single capture of a cat!! Of course, our cat had been going crazy with another male cat prowling around the house!! And this cat was big…he ate my ham!!
Case has been solved. Oh, but there is more. We have another Sherlock Gnomes story to share with you! Tune in next time for more mystery and entertainment from the farm!
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