Fun fact: The smallest breed of cat is the Singapura. Females may weigh as little as four pounds.
When we bought our ten-acre “mini-farm” back in 1991, our family inherited Snagglepuss, a flame-orange barn cat that the sellers had adopted. She was joined the following year by a cat of similar appearance, but very different temperament, that someone dumped by the side of the road near our house late one autumn night.
My sister had been visiting, and in the wee hours she heard a car slow down, then one of its doors slam before it drove away. She didn’t think any more about it until our daughter found the cat in the morning when she was starting to walk to school. After listening to some teary-eyed gushing from her about how adorable he was and how Snagglepuss needed a friend, we told her we would keep him if no one came to claim him. Of course, no one did.
Our daughter may have honestly thought Snagglepuss would like having a friend, but the older cat quickly made it clear she had other ideas. She disliked the new cat at first sight, hissing at him whenever he got too close or tried to play with her always-twitching tail. Even worse, she seemed to hold him in contempt because he was lazy and a terrible “mouser.” Those qualities, along with his golden-orange coloring, gave us the idea for his name: Goldbrick.
One of the few things those two barn cats agreed on was that no other cats belonged in the territory they shared begrudgingly with each other. There was a small tiger-gray feral cat living under a fallen tree along the creek bank, and both our cats chased the poor little stray away at every opportunity. Though our fields surely had enough mice to feed an army of cats, they weren’t willing to share a single one of them with the interloper if they could prevent it.
With that as the backstory, I couldn’t have been more surprised at what I found when I went out to the barn on Christmas morning to give the kitties a treat. Our barn cats were a bit spoiled, with a long table set up with a comfortable arrangement of crates and blankets to keep them warm. They also had a heat lamp designed for poultry overhead. Since it was bitter cold that was where I found them — under the heat lamp. But as they stood up and stretched, I saw that I was going to need to split their plate of sausage and eggs three ways instead of two. The little gray stray was nestled between them, out of the cold and snow. I had never before seen or heard of cats — especially barn cats — with so much “Christmas spirit”!
After that week’s cold snap was over, our cats also snapped out of their holiday mood and began chasing the stray away as before. But when the stray had been in danger of freezing to death, they seemed to sense that it was no time for being territorial and selfish, and were moved to something as close to pity as cats are capable of feeling.
Animal behavior has been studied a great deal, but the animals themselves still have a lot to teach us.
~Mary L. Hickey
