The Secret Lives of Barn Cats

Invasive Ecological Murderers We Love Like Family

I knew you were trouble when you walked in.

I was writing when I heard the raven scream in the front yard. I knew that sound, knew it well, but was not expecting to hear it in January.

It sounded like the call juvenile ravens make to each other when they are tearing around the forest in their youth. It’s the corvid equivalent to drunk sports fans after a championship win; raucous and loud (and somewhat alarming) but rarely a cause for concern. But those joyous alarm calls are usually only heard on the mountain in late June or early July, when all the spring fledglings are on their own and exploring/flying around the forest in their makeshift cliques. It is not the sound you hear from a single raven when it is 21 degrees outside.

I went outside to see what was going on with the neighborhood. Across the road, about 50 yards from where I was standing was the frantic raven, large as a toddler and bobbing his maned feathered neck as he made his alarm calls. He was maybe 30ft up an ash tree? I looked and saw another raven a few branches below him, still as a statue and wondered why only one of them was engaging in the hollering…

Then I realized what I was looking at.

That wasn’t a second raven. That was Angus. My yearling black cat. He was sitting 6 feet below the screaming raven on a lower branch (but still a story higher than my house) watching the giant black bird yell at him. He looked the same way he does watching birds at the feeder from behind a window, tail twitching lazily looking up at a bird twice his size yelling at him to leave.

Being a cat. He didn’t. He watched a few more minutes until the bird took off, probably at my human yelling of “GET DOWN FROM THERE AND STOP BOTHERING THE NEIGHBORS!”

Angus, hearing me yell, darted his eyes and did just that. He found a way to hug the bark and shimmy until he could jump and clear the last ten feet, and then started trotting back towards the farmhouse’s open door, bottle brush tail in the air as if to say, “What? You think you’re the only one in this house bothering birds on this mountain? Anything new to eat in there? I smell chicken?”and then walked right past my striped wool socks without even looking up. I never felt more like the nanny from the Muppet Babies in my life…

trouble trouble trouble

I keep cats on the farm for the same reason most people do around here: pest control. Angus, Bo, and Bree - the cat employees of Cold Antler, are not here to heat laps. They are here to murder.

I know this is controversial, especially to my birding and conservation-minded friends. I get it, folks. I am also a birder. I love wild birds so much I made a few my roommates. I understand how devastating the domestic cat is to wildlife—especially the songbird population—but that is not a problem that will be solved by keeping my three cats indoors. In fact, keeping my cats from hunting around the barn would create way more problems.

A population of rats can swell from two to over a thousand in one year. That is not an exaggeration, not in the slightest. A farm like mine, with open outdoor feeding stations for chickens, pigs, horses and sheep, is a HUGE draw to critters that could overtake this farm in a few months. My cats are essential workers here. They and the thousands of other cats in this county that do the same for their farms.

To their credit, all of my cats have done a fine job. The trio hunt mice and rats daily. It is rare I see signs of mice anywhere in the house and it’s getting rarer around the barnyard. Three adult hunters taking a rodent a day is why my chickens and pigs can eat at their feeders at all. Because without my room-and-board-paid assassins they would be overtaken by rats like a biblical plague.

That confessed, I never argue with the indoor-cat people because they’re right. I’m still not bringing my cats inside, because so am I. For all the horrors the domestic cat has done to wild America, I am at peace with my choice to employ them here because I need them. But of all the animals I work with, none are as insane as cats. You will never find a border collie talking to a bird in a tree if there’s sheep on the ground, I’ll tell you that much for free.

Barn cats have these secret lives that feel almost wrong to know about, but I wish I knew more about Angus’s. I am grateful he’s such a good mouser, but worry about him because he is so bold. He will leave on a full belly of Friskies at sunrise and not come back for hours. Loki witness and pity him, the trouble he’s getting up to when he clocks out... There could be a speakeasy in town he’s running the books for and I’ll never know. None of us will.

Angus is a wonder. I have see him doze off in a flowerpot in the yard and watched him dart through the forest half a mile away from home when driving to town. I’ve seen him paws-deep in the creek chasing frogs and walking casually through the woods in the dark of night, both times unaware they could be eaten by one clever coyote in a split second.

Which is the actual controversy I feel about barn cats. I love Angus. He’s like a puppy to me. I have never raised a kitten before as a cat person. It was so different bringing him up with such care and attention. He is much more friendly, pleasant, and social than my other feline roommates because of it. It doesn’t make him more valuable, but it does make us closer, literally and figuratively.

Every morning I let him out that door I know there’s a chance he might not come back, but I still do it. Like my free-range chickens I would rather risk his loss than coop him up. He is a beast that knows he can climb into the sky and talk to ravens. You try and get him to come inside…

And yet, every evening he comes running back indoors with paws light as cotton balls purring like a baby. We share this house. We fall asleep in the same bed. Isn’t that insane!? The animal I hired to rip rats apart with his face is falling asleep vibrating happiness against my neck, tucked together like memories. Me and this small monster, the reason for such love and trouble, meant to be.

I hope he always comes home. But if he doesn’t, I know it was one hell of a story. Which may seem harsh, but honestly, I feel the same way about me.

The only free life is on your own terms.

Long live barn cats.