I Doubt The Other Eight Would Have Made A Difference...

We've gone through a few cats around Hillbilly Hill over the years. Some come in as strays, some come in from family members, and some from friends.

The way they LEAVE also is quite variable.

We've had death by goat-stomping, dog attack, "thwacking", the occasional .22 round, and even stupidity. There have also been some who just plain disappeared.

We lost one batch of cats because they were born in July, and hadn't quite figured out how to survive in winter. The morning I found the first one, frozen stiff, in the middle of the barn floor, I figured it was an isolated incident. Little did I know, that a few days later, I'd find three more of the furry little geniuses curled up in a little frozen ball out in the open - just mere feet away from a stack of nice, warm hay they could have burrowed into.

Of course - burrowing into the hay has it's hazards, too. One winter, I found a "cat-cicle" laying on top of two bales - kind of across the gap between them. Unfortunately, that poor sod froze to death while blocking the escape of the two "smarter" kitties who had burrowed beneath it. By the time I found them, it was done too late...

We've even had attempted lynchings. Several of our kittens ganged up on one of their siblings, and tried to hang her. It was only shear luck that I ran across the gang during the commission of the crime, and saved the poor girl. Here is the story from a past entry: Kitty Mafia

Granted, what I'm about to write has nothing whatsoever to do with the Mob (I think they've long since moved on...), but it has everything to do with stupidity.

One of the kittens we brought home this last fall wasn't thinking too straight. I noticed something wrong when I broke out the food that morning - we were one cat short at the feed pan. I took note of it, but there ain't a whole lot to be done about a missing cat, so I continued on about my business.

It was only after the goats had been fed, and the cows had been milked that I headed to the cow pen in the barn to clean out the "over night muck" the bovine seem so glad to make, that I found the body...

There it lay, in the middle of the cow pen - flatter than the proverbial one-sided pancake. The thing about a cow is, while they might be nice and toasty warm, they also weigh a TAD bit more than a cat. If you're gonna snuggle up to one, be sure you sleep with one eye open so you can dart the instant you feel it move.

I remember when my mom owned a bakery in our town. She had a nice 6" rolling pin that was about 20" long (I still have it in my attic...) that she used to roll out doughnut dough. I can still hear that dough "pop" and "smack" as it flattened out.

One only imagines what the cat heard when the cows played "rolling pin" on her. It is most assured, though, that the feline had the life steam rolled out of her that night - and the offending cow probably didn't hear a thing, nor even notice what had transpired.

The poor kitty looked like it had been run through one of those wringers from an antique washing machine. I suspect that every bone in it's body was broken in at least three places.

One thing IS certain, though, even if the cat had cashed in the other eight lives, it wouldn't have made a difference.

When a cow presses your shirt, you want to make sure you're not still in it....