This happened two days ago when it was raining heavily in the morning.
Riley came to our gate, in the heavy rain and mewed loudly. It was his customary morning visit, but even in the heavy rain?
Jayden was with me, in my arms, but I quickly brought out a bowl of kibble for him (Riley doesn’t like canned food). I placed the bowl in the shade so that he could come in to eat without being in the rain, but he just stayed where he was, drenched in the rain. I waited with the hope that he would come in but he didn’t.
Oh dear…cats’ vision aren’t that good, I know, but the bowl was right in front of him, definitely within his line of vision, and yet he could not see it? So I went out again, with Jayden still in my arms, and pushed the bowl out as far as I could to the boundary before getting the rain.
Each time I went out, Riley would run away as usual, but he would come back out the moment I get back into the house. He is still wary of humans.
Jayden and I waited, peeping from our window and FINALLY…Little Riley came in and ate the food. Phew…
Yesterday, Riley did not come. I’m quite sure he has a home up the road. He used to hang around a lot with Samantha (the now pregnant Calico), but lately, he has been going solo.
Instead, Samantha came yesterday evening and ate up TWO bowls of food.
Meanwhile, the ginger tom who raped Samantha (yes, I saw it happening in September and chased him away, but it was too late) came to stay in our porch yesterday. A friendly neighbourhood dog came to our gate wagging his tail happily and the ginger tom fluffed himself up and “defended” our porch.
Quite a number of cats have been coming into our compound lately.
Can you just imagine what it would have been liked if Minnie-5 were free roaming? There would surely be fights and trips to the vet’s. But that is what CNRM is all about, ie. neutered cats defending their territory and preventing other unneutered cats from coming into it. That was how Cow Mau and Bunny defended our entire street in their hey day back in our old neighbourhood. That was really One-Street CNRM, to the letter. Indy helped too but most of the defensive were done by Cow Mau and Bunny.
In our present neighbourhood, Vincent, Zurik, Ginger, Rosie and even Heidi and Timmy defended our area. But Timmy and Zurik could never get along and this resulted in Timmy going away. That can happen as well even though all our CNRM-cats were neutered. Being neutered just means they no longer have the sexual urge and this may result in fewer fights which are caused by the urge to mate, but neutering does not necessarily mean the territorial nature will be gone. In fact, for all our cats, they still had their territorial nature intact after being neutered. For what it is worth, maybe they become even MORE territorial because with no more sexual urge, what else is there to do but to defend your territory even more aggressively? In this way, that’s why CNRM works, isn’t it?
But all said, we cannot let Minnie-5 out now because we have neighbours who will not tolerate the presence of street animals in the vicinity. In fact, we will be getting a new neighbour who has told us that she does not like animals.
So that’s what it is with humans. We do not expect every human to like animals, but we hope they will at least allow animals to be on their own without harming them. As a wise person had once appealed, “Even if you don’t like them, at least do not harm them.”
There are many humans whom we do not like, isn’t there? Oh yes, I do have a list of humans whom I do not like too. But we don’t go out harming them, do we? So why must some animal-haters harm animals? Is it because animals are smaller than them? If it is, isn’t that plain bullying? Isn’t that a form of terrorism?