Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

I need to explain something about life in the country: we have pretty much everything we need. We could use more money, more grass seed, more rain, and more reliable cell phone reception . . . but otherwise, we're doing fine.

We don't need any more cats, thanks.

I can imagine the scenario. You have a female indoor cat who gets out one night, lured by the serenading male cats out on your lawn (who were, of course, lured there by her feline feminine cycle in the first place).

A few weeks later -- and it is WAY too late tonight to Google the gestation period of the common house cat, sorry -- you've got KITTENS. What to do?

You could sit outside of Safeway with a box of wriggling, adorable kittens; sit there all week until every Safeway patron in town has snubbed you, twice.

You could take them to the Humane Society, but that would just be an admission of owning an unspayed cat, and who needs that kind of grief on a Tuesday? Not me -- not you, either, apparently.

So, you do the logical thing, and drive way out to the country to dump them beside the road in the dark . . . next to a dairy or farm. "Hey," you reason, "Dairies have mice and rats, so they need cats!"

There are a couple of problems with this thinking. First, we HAVE cats. If the cats we have weren't feral we'd be thinking about driving all 4000 of them over to YOUR place to dump them. We hear you've got a female in heat . . .

Second, cats are not born knowing how to hunt. They are trained by their mothers to hunt, just like lions are. If their mother should die before they learn to hunt, the wild kittens aren't likely to survive, unless they find a doorstep where they can lurk to do their hunting. In the human world we call this begging.

Third problem, and this is the cruelest one: the feral cat population is kept in check in four ways. One, the survival of the fittest, otherwise known as starvation. It isn't pretty. Two, gang warfare, in which the biggest and toughest survivors throw their weight around. It isn't pretty. Three, overpopulation, which always leads to disease. Feline distemper scourges the property periodically, systematically thinning the cat population and leaving a few ragged survivors, more desperate than ever. It isn't pretty.

Finally, four. This is the human -- and humane -- solution to what's left of the cat problem that Nature couldn't quite wipe out: crowd control. This is best accomplished with a .22 rifle and a beer chaser. I have never done it -- I'm way too soft, and that's no compliment -- but I tip my hat to those who take up the grim task every now and then when the cat population is out of control.

At this date we have three adopted cats who are allowed in the house. Outside we feed four cats and two kittens, all but one wild. There were more, but disease has made a recent sweep. Mom feeds at least five over at her house. Not feeding them is not an option. We tried that, and the bolder ones ended up trying to get into our house, fighting with our cats, and generally making us all miserable.

So while I know that YOU would never dump an animal out in the country (dogs are dumped almost as often, with even sadder results, usually), there are people out there who will. I hope they know that they do no one -- especially the cats -- any favors. Please spay and neuter your pets.

This is Campos, who was living in the orange tree in our yard when we moved in. He had been abandoned and was thin, frightened and miserable. Now he's obnoxiously large and secure.