My original title for this article was: Would You Like A Rattlesnake With Your Coffee? Or, Why A Cat Is The Most Valuable Animal on a Farm. (That was a bit long-winded.)
I was sitting peacefully in a recliner, sipping my morning coffee, when my beautiful cat, Rosita, jumped up onto the chair next to me. She wanted to offer me a treat to go with my coffee. A nice, tasty rattlesnake.
Fortunately, she had already killed it.
She held it up to me, hoping I would like it. What I liked was that it was dead, but I appreciated her intentions. She was quite the sight: a dead rattler dangling from her mouth, surrounded by a cloud of long, fluffy whipped cream and chocolate fur, with her deep cobalt blue eyes lovingly gazing at me. She looked like the most useless, luxurious thing on earth, but despite her totally sheltered life, she was all huntress.
This was the second rattlesnake that had gotten into the hundred-year-old house. My cats had alerted me to the first one by standing around it in a circle, taking bets on who was going to get it first. I settled the matter by dropping a heavy cast iron pot on its head.
My background: I bred cats as a hobby about forty years (Balinese and Ragdolls) and kept them as a quarantined indoor colony. Except for the boys, and new mothers with young kittens, my cats had the run of the house. For about ten years I also had a free roaming outdoor colony. Then a neighbor sprayed her yard with the glycophosphate, Roundup. You don’t want to know.
Cats are normally prized for their rodent hunting abilities, as they should be. But they are also superb snake hunters, and will willingly clear your land, house, garage and barn of every snake they can find.
Snakes hate cats. Cats love snakes. Snakes are such fun to play with. You may not realize it, but many cat toys are actually “snakes” colored in such a way that the human eye does not read them as snakes – but cats do.
“Snake” is wired into cats’ brains. I once brought home a long, thick extension cord, and since my hands were full, just put it down on the floor in its original coil, and left to put the groceries away. On return, one of my Balinese, who had never been outside in her life, was approaching the coiled cord in slow, stealthy, steps – which I had never seen her do before. She was on high alert, not entirely sure about danger, but clearly felt that this thing ought to be prey.
To a cat, a snake is an irresistible toy. Snakes slither and slide and try to escape, but are far too slow to get away. Some will try to coil and strike, but that’s fun too. The cat is nearly always faster. There’s a touch of danger, but the cat usually wins. Looking out the window one afternoon, I saw one of my outdoor girls walking across the yard toward the house with her head oddly elevated, dragging something behind her. Looking more closely, I saw that her rather small self was bringing home what was left of a thick, five-foot long snake. She looked proud. The snake was so badly shredded that I had not immediately recognized what it was. Chunks were hanging off of it.
Snakes are terrified of cats, and normally do their best to stay away. I once bought a secluded house in a rocky, mountainside forest: serious snake country. When shown the house, I was warned that the cellar had copperheads and rattlers. It did.
For years after moving in I would find cast off snakeskins in the cellar. There was a gap under the cellar door leading into the kitchen. The snakes never, ever came upstairs to play with my cats, except for one fool copperhead that I found hanging outside from the knob of the front door. I knocked it off, and dropped a cast iron frying pan on its head (my favorite technique).
The people who later bought the house did not have cats. Unfortunately for them. The snakes promptly moved upstairs. Ever see snake poop?
Cats are often called “the most valuable animal on the farm.” This is true. They keep snakes out of the hen house, out of the barn where they can strike at livestock and you, and out of the yard and house where they can attack pets, family members and children.
But cats’ supreme value is exterminating mice. While snakes do eat rodents, they only eat one or two a week, and none in icy weather. Any cat can more than double that in a day. One cat was recorded killing over fifty mice in one day! Cats are far more efficient than snakes for rodent removal. And they don’t frighten the horses.
This has a further side effect on reducing snake populations: no mice, no dinner. Time for snakes to move away, and hunt mice – somewhere there isn’t a colony of cats.
WHY YOU REALLY, REALLY DON’T WANT MICE AROUND
Getting up in the morning to make breakfast…but what are those little pill-shaped black things scattered around on the kitchen counter? Mouse poop! Mice don’t do their business in the corner, they drop urine and feces while they are walking. Their urine and feces carry various diseases, the worst of which is hantavirus.
Hantavirus occurs in almost every state in America, but at this point is found mainly in the western Great Plains, the mountain states, the southwest, and the west coast. In the east, New York and Pennsylvania have the highest rates. In the west it is mostly carried by deer mice; in the northeast by white-footed mice.
It has a fatality rate of 35-50 percent. And that is with hospitals, intensive care units, ventilators, and oxygen available for severe cases. There is no treatment for it, other than supportive care. Without modern medicine, the death rate would be much higher. (I personally would try natural anti-virals such as elderberry, high-dose vitamin D, high-dose Vitamin C, Ivermectin, etc. See Buhner’s Herbal Antibiotics, 2nd edition.)
At first, it seems to be the flu, but it gets nasty rapidly, attacking either the heart and lungs, or the kidneys, depending on the variety of the virus.
Transmission is by rodents only: urine, feces, saliva, bites and scratches. There is no human-to-human transmission. You become infected by breathing in the virus, eating virus-contaminated food, or touching an infected surface and then touching your mouth, nose or eyes.
A cat colony will help keep your kitchen and food supplies from being urinated and defecated on by mice. My old house was infested with mice when I moved in. Within several weeks, they were almost gone. A few would come in from the outside occasionally, but they did not last long. And the outdoor colony kept the total numbers outside fairly low.
Rodents multiply wildly when there is no predator control. One unplanned side effect of spay-neuter programs for cats is an explosion of rodents. They have been counted as having up to ten times the population density than they did in the past. (See Buhner’s book, Healing Lyme, 2015 edition.)
Spay-neuter programs may also have something to do with the spread of Lyme disease. Lyme is carried by ticks which live on mice and other rodents the first year of their lives. The ticks move to larger animals the second year. Ticks have a two-year life cycle. Lyme is a very ancient disease that suddenly began to spread widely around the same time spay-neuter programs became popular in the 1970s. The street I live on is about a mile long. Twenty-five years ago, there were a fair number of stray cats to be seen. Now there are none.
No mice, no Lyme. My rather unkempt yard at the edge of the forest should have been full of ticks. As it was full of cats, I usually found no more than a couple of ticks on me each year. The ticks did get on the cats, who ate them when they groomed themselves. Bye.
A comment on spay-neuter programs: I am all in favor of them in urban environments, but in most rural environments they are silly. You may have seen charts of what the cat population would look like without them: rapid doubling of the population, until the world is covered in cats. This is ridiculous. Any animal that reproduces quickly does so because the attrition rate is also very high. Cats are small, prey animals themselves, and their population tends to fluctuate within bounds unless there is an abundant food source (like a restaurant dumpster). My outdoor colony varied from two to six cats over the years, despite having breakfast and good shelter.
During normal times you may want to spay/neuter some or all of your cats, depending on your situation. I advise leaving the very friendliest and best hunters whole, so you can keep your colony going. You can then select the best of their kittens, keep them whole, and spay/neuter the others. That will restrict your numbers, without sterilizing your colony.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)