Not the Cat Lady

We joke with my husband that if he hadn't gotten married, he'd be living above a garage somewhere with a dozen junk cars in the front yard. Conversely, if I didn't have the responsibility of a husband and kids, I'd likely have a dozen or more cats, taking in all the neighborhood strays and orphaned kittens. I'd be the harried woman buying cat food in fifty-pound bags and litter by the ton, lining up rows of food bowls along the kitchen floor and surrounded at night by all my feline friends. It wouldn't be a bad life, really...

Actually, I know this "cat lady." She lives in a nice middle-class suburb not far from here, a neighborhood with two-car garages and neatly manicured lawns. From the street it is not evident that some twenty-eight feral cats reside in the back yard, until you look out the kitchen window and spy them prowling by the fence and around the pool, or basking in the sunshine on the deck, where rows of blanketed chairs serve as improvised beds around a huge tray of food bowls (seven different brands of food - the cats are finicky!) None of the cats are tame enough to approach - they scatter at the sight of humans - but my friend provides them food and shelter and safety, the best home they've known. To me, she is an angel.

Recently I asked her how she came to have so many cats, as I know she traps most of them and takes them to be spayed or neutered - where did all these kitties come from? Some apparently are the offspring of those she couldn't catch, but most have just wandered in or been dropped off as unwanted pets by people who know she feeds strays. Any morning she might wake up to find a hungry newcomer on the porch, just the way people drop off cats or dogs at farms and assume they will find a home there.

Absently my mind wandered to goats...what if this started happening to us? Weary goat owners driving by might spot Em and Ellie frolicking on the roof and think, "Aha! That is a place where goats are pampered - let's sneak ours in tonight!" And in the morning Megan would tell me, "Mom, it looks like two more were dropped off during the night..." Or what if feral goats started wandering in, and by summer's end we had a whole colony - taking over the yard, the deck, and I would be exhausted from hauling huge tubs of hay and grain for them and shoveling mountains of waste..this is the stuff of nightmares.

But......the evil, desperate side of me had another idea - when I drive by a local farm and see dozens of goats happily grazing, perhaps nobody would notice if two small black and white, mangy-looking caprines with flaky skin and hairless eyes just sort of blended in...Come on, boys, let's take a little drive in the back of the minivan tonight...

Or if I stopped feeding them for a few days I could almost pass them off as large felines - I know a place where cats are never turned away!