up a gum tree

Wednesday 17.1.2018

Ted, the cat, is now in training to be a farm cat.  I have been letting him run free during the day and shutting him in at night.  He is actually very friendly and purrs when I stoke him.  Yesterday I took a family on a farm tour and he came with us.  He jumped off the top of the house roof onto the lower tin roof where the solar panels for hot water are and I had to climb over the parapet onto the roof to lift him back just in case he was stuck.

He also tried a straight-line approach to our route and was rebuffed by various fences that failed to bow down before him.    He is probably better informed about farm fences now.   The big question is will he be any good as a hunter?   He showed some signs that he was not totally without instinct yesterday when he spent the afternoon chasing fluff balls in the shed.   Today he was rather more ambitious and decided to hunt chickens.  The chickens were alarmed but intrigued so that it was difficult to decide who was hunting whom.   I saved his dignity by going into the pen and rescuing him.

His next experiment involved shooting up a big gum tree.   He got well up too and the small branches were shaking alarmingly under his weight.    He soon decided that he was not actually very happy about his position and had to work out how to get himself down.   At one stage he stretched between two tree limbs and was stuck for a few minutes looking very comical but he worked his way out of this dilemma and once on terra firma dashed off to Edd’s shed.