SRS, I think you did not intend your post as it first struck me--

But just to clarify, we do not let our pets out loose either. Sam is semi-feral and had her own quarters to patrol and defend. By semi-feral I mean she had learned to beg, trip passersby, and wheedle, sometimes climbing a leg or a lap to make her wishes perfectly clear.

She learned to wait her turn for a discarded paper plate or an almost-emptied cup of milky tea. She never learned to be picked up without promptly dispatching one who would initiate a touch on her.


The weeks she spent in sick bay when I helped her with infected bites were the most miserable of her life, and she soon effected her escape.
OTOH when she needed help she was good at getting it-- like the horrific hind leg she shattered and trained Hardi to attend her self-managed recovery.


Sam was a great farm cat. She was also quite elderly when we received her several years ago. It was/is her time.

In comparing notes over the last day we saw her, we think a snake may have gotten her. She had gotten a little too feeble to nail the many rabbits here, and we saw a tiny baby snake dead on the porch where she had displayed her kills a few days before she vanished. (That one was not a rattler.)

The day we found her moribund I had seen her, tail a-twitch, stalking an odd spot in the yard. She was vividly alive and well, all predator working from head to tail-tip. I thought she was awaiting a mouse's exit from a drainpipe nearby, from the position she was in. Now I wonder if she surprised a young rattler, or it surprised her. From time to time one comes out from under the porch she was next to, and it's been an awfully dry summer-- grass daid in several spots.

In looking for her we have seen 5 or 6 shallow holes in cool places she may have dug for relief.

Needless to say we are always careful, ourselves, about snakes here.

I think Faulkner had hisseff a snaky kinda surprise out in the cold-puddle section of DW ydy, too. His reaction when he tried to play was so "big" that Sadie barked the intruder-alarm from her section 12 feet away.

~Susan