On January 9th we welcomed four new members to the FarmHouse Rescue family. Four young cats, siblings that were born next to a freeway and lost their mother to a car accident. These cats were caught by OC Community Cats, fixed, and vaccinated and they named them Freeway, Euclid, Ninety-One and Nellie. They did not want to release them where they were found as it would certainly have been a death sentence, but the cats are not socialized and have only known life outside. Linda, one of our volunteers, also volunteers at OCCC and told us the story, so we decided to take them on as barn cats.
You may be thinking ‘what is a barn cat?’ Barn cats live in and around barns, stables, and other farm buildings. They are often feral cats that have been caught, spayed, or neutered to prevent overpopulation, and then released to live in the barn to help control the population of pests such as mice, rats and other rodents that can damage equipment, contaminate feed, and spread disease.
Barn cats are effective at controlling pest populations because they are natural predators and have a strong instinct to hunt small animals. These rescue cats are essentially wild cats as they are not socialized or accustomed to any kind of human contact and more often will get hit by cars or starve to death. Therefore, we were more than happy to take them on as the new barn cats for FarmHouse Rescue.
It is best to have more than one barn cat as they generally do better when they have other cats for companionship, and we would not have wanted to separate these siblings as they may have struggled with this. We also strongly believe they will settle in much quicker with their companions around them.
We started with the cats in a big cage inside the barn to acclimatize them to their surroundings and get them used to all the new smells, then gradually as they become accustomed to their environment they will be released out into the barn. They can then start hunting; this is perfect for us as it is an environmentally friendly way to pest control and having so many animals around the farm means we must be extra careful not to use chemicals that could potentially harm any of them. We hope the kitties will be incredibly happy with us.
