We had many barn cats over my life growing up as a child. A barn cat is a cat we "owned" (does anyone ever really "own" a cat?) but left running "wild" outside. These cats mostly stayed in the barn. Each morning and night after milking the cow, I would pour some warm milk into a dish for the barn cats.
As an interesting fact, we always named the dogs we owned. I cannot remember a single dog in my life that did not have a name. However, we had many cats. I can only remember a few of them that we named. In fact, as I write this post, I can only remember Matty (the house cat Mom got while I was on my mission) and Calico (the house cat when I was very young).
I also remember one of Mom's kindergarten students gave her two Siamese kittens as a present on the last day of school one year. We named them Tom 1 and Tom 2. They were never house cats. We never learned to tell them apart from each other. Hence we called both of them Tom. Neither lived to cat adulthood as they were both run over by cars on the road in front of the house before the summer ended.
Actually, one of them (Tom) got run over (and surely killed) twice before the summer ended. He was the first one that was hit by a car. Dad was nearby that day and picked up what he thought was a dead kitten and moved him to the barpit. Dad did not thoroughly check on Tom because he surely looked lifeless and lost a lot of blood. However, Tom showed up a few days later and lived long enough to be run over again. The second time he did not survive.
The barn cats would collect in the cow barn during milking time to wait for the milk I would pour into the dish for them. (The dish was the top of an old milk can.) I would teach them how to catch a stream of milk in their mouths (see example photo from LIFE magazine).
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| "Cats enjoyed squirts of milk at Arch Badertscher’s dairy farm" Photo Credit: Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock |
Over the years, we had many different cats. Like most cats, they would come and go as they pleased. I am sure they occasionally wandered to the Haderlies and/or the Larsons. We would also periodically have litters of kittens.
For a couple of years, one of the barn cats was a tom cat that Kelly and I called "Fightin' Tom." He would only come around every few days or so. I am sure he was a wandering tom and visited all the female cats at both next-door neighbors (Haderlies and Larsons). Perhaps the neighbors even considered him "their" cat.
We called him "Fightin' Tom" because he liked to go up on the top of the hill behind the barn and fight the rock chucks. Sometimes when he showed up in the barn, he could barely crawl. He would have a few missing tufts of fur, bite marks on his legs and paws, and sometimes a torn ear. He would lay around the barn for a few days, drink milk at milking time, and then disappear for some tomcat adventures.
Then, we never saw him again.
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