
What about the cat
Couldn't they just put a sign on the catflap saying "Cats Only"?
Compelling evidence for the existence of UK cryptid "the badger" has been recorded in the south-coast town of Gosport – and it appears to have a penchant for ice lollies. Most commonly sighted as a bloodied furry hulk lying at the side of dual carriageways or screwing up plans for Apple data centres, BBC Springwatch has the …
Or, (slightly more seriously) get a cat-flap that reads the RFID chips and only lets the registered ones in.. We probably ought to do that to stop some of the local strays coming in to eat our cats food[1] but it's at least a way to get them fed - putting cat meat out in the garden will only result in fat(ter) dogs..
(And before people whinge that they can't afford to get their cats chipped, the PDSA or Blue Cross will do it for free. Likewise spaying. Having a pet is a responsibility, not a right).
[1] At least one of the strays is an un-neutered male and thus outranks (in cat terms) all of ours since ours are all neutered. Although the young female is dominant enough to object and chase the interlopers away (male cats being somewhat scared of seriously annoying a female cat because they don't fight fair). And SeniorDog hates them and will also chase them. But, at 15, SD is getting somewhat blind and deaf and his sense of smell isn't as good as it used to be so he doesn't always know they are there. And YoungestDog isn't fully adult yet so isn't that bothered about territory.
but..
This had been countered by -
Wont Somebody Think of The Child(ren)
Though as a single mum, she is eligible for a torrent of hate mail from conservatives, and since she is not feeding her offspring on organic free trade vegan spiritually certified recycled-but-plastic-free fad food, the progressives will have a go at her as well.
Top Tip: Poundland rubbers are a great alternative to posh foods. Fried in butter they can be used to replace scallops or sliced into rings and lightly poached in butter can stand in for calamari. For a foreign touch, boiled and cooked in garlic butter, they make an excellent alternative to snails...
Scallops are lovely. Just lighty fried, and perhaps served on a disk of black pudding or haggis
Well done - you've managed to get a perfect trifecta of foods that I really, really can't stand..
(Scallops don't taste too bad but the texture is like eating play dough. Black Pudding - no, just no. Clotted blood soaked up into oats? Haggis - made with lamb. Even the really peppery ones still take of lamb..)
I'll stick to the nice side salad and buttery Jersey Royals TYVM. Like wot we had with last nights Guinea Fowl on a bed of lentils and bacon..
I'm sure this technology https://qz.com/1623074/china-builds-a-facial-recognition-app-for-pandas/amp/ can be adapted to badgers - they kind of fit into the black and white things with paws classification.
Just fit to the cat flap and if any unknown badgers turn up then they are locked out - Bob's your uncle.
OK so the US may ban this Chinese technology... some crap about five eyes, these only have two so should be just tickety-boo.
Before we had chip-reading catflaps there was an event where an uninvited guest moggie found himself outnumbered two-and-a-half[0] to one, and elected to rapidly exit the way he came in. Unfortunately, that one was set to entry only[1]. The result was the flapper part ending up in several pieces outside, and us replacing both catflaps with chip reader models.
[0] one is a bit ambivalent regarding intruders; more cats means more companions, but also more competition for food.
[1] it's in a remote corner of a workshop, so a bit impractical to switch from bidirectional by day to entry only for the night, like we do with the other.
There's very little companionship between unrelated cats
Complete and utter rubbish. Two of our seven cats are related (brother and sister) and they are both much, much closer to our other cats than they are to each other. Another two are related (mother and daughter) and the mother despises the daughter and won't tolerate her sitting next to her on the bed.
Cats will happily co-exist with non-related cats assuming that you:
1. Give them plenty of space to have their own place in the house.
2. Introduce and socialise them properly, preferrably when young.
3. Treat them like cats, not mini-humans. Don't expect them to buddy up just because you force them together.
Most of the strange cats that we've had intruding into our house over the years have been unneutered males - they automatically outrank neutered cats and most won't tackle them. Given the help available from people like the PDSA or Blue Cross (or Cats Protection League) there is absolutely no excuse for not having your cats neutered (unless you are breeding cats or need to maintain a viable farm cat population - and in that case you need to bring unrelated cats from elsewhere because male cats *will* mate with any female who is receptive, even their own sisters.
Complete and utter rubbish.
Indeed. This third cat making up the half-cat in the aforementioned scenario was a rescue from a cat-hoarding-and-auto-multiplying situation that in the end totalled 65 (!) cats. He was clearly accustomed to having LotsaCats around[0], which also explains his 'Food? vacuum_cleaner_mode=max' behaviour. We took him in with two other, totally unrelated cats, and he became perfect friends with one of them.
[0] their relation diagram being a graph, not a tree
When I was a teenager (a _very_ long time ago), we had a cat, he was the only live born of a litter of seven, who grew up to be a very large moggy, the scourge of the neighbourhood. If other cats were in our garden when Mickey arrived, there was a sudden exodus of the other cats. He tolerated next door's cat, Sooty, to the extent that Sooty sometimes ventured into our house for some fuss and cat treats if no-one was in at his home. Down the road from us, a young child was very ill, she had a brain tumour, which, in those days, was inoperable. She wanted a kitten to play with, so a small black and white kitten was procured, and saddled with the name Noddy. As her condition deteriorated, and finally became terminal, Noddy was ejected into the garden and no longer allowed into the house. One morning, Mickey scratched at the kitchen window to demand entrance (no catflaps in those days), and Mum went to open the back door. Mickey shepherded Noddy into the kitchen and stood over him while he ate the food on offer, and then wouldn't let any one near him. We accepted him into our family, and Mickey adopted him as his protege, if Noddy got into trouble, he would make a bee-line for Mickey, disappear under his long fur, and stick his head out from between Mickey's front legs. Any pursuing cat would be confronted with a two-headed monster cat, one large tabby head, complete with battle scars, and a smaller, black and white head, under the chin of the larger head. Cue frantic scrabbling change of direction and instant disappearance of pursuer. Unfortunately, we had to leave the country for fourteen months, my father was sent to the USA on teacher exchange, and the old lady next door said she would feed our two cats while we were away. When we returned, Noddy had moved out and found somewhere else to live, we saw him occasionally, but Mickey wouldn't leave Mum alone, always in close proximity, between her feet, until he eventually died of Kidney Failure at 17.
where an uninvited guest moggie found himself outnumbered
We too have had a cat door destroyed by an intruder-cat trying to exit at a higher speed than the cat door could tolerate..
Mind you, when being chased by 45kg of very annoyed Rottie/Dobermann who really, really, really didn't like cats who were not Her Cats coming into the house the reasons for the haste were not hard to understand..
Thing is, cat flaps aren't very lockable. A persistent or strong cat can often get through them, and a badger is about 10x stronger than a tabby cat!
Wooden board, on the outside, is probably the best answer, and get the cat to jump through a window!
I do a lot of night cycling in the rurual-ish area I live in because I love the quiet emptiness of it all without the noisy stream of cars & people everywhere.
Along the cyclepaths & single track roads I'll regularly spook a badger into running away, but not always, one time I saw the familiar shape in the bright light of my bike in the path and stopped because it didn't move, it was a young badger and curious, I pushed my bike forwards gently pressing on the brake to make it squeak a couple of time but it didn't move, just sniffing the air in my direction, I shuffled my feet and it got the message.
Also, I discovered if you're stood still being absolutely quiet and a badger is walking in your direction and you don't want to make it run off in a blind panic, make loud breathing sounds through your nose and it'll realise something is there then turn round and saunter back a different direction.
Really great to see badgers quite close when I've stopped for a drink and silently patiently waited a little while, they'll sometimes run past me on the other side of the single-track road, except this one time I did scare them off from the noise of a fart :D
The saddest night wildlife sight I saw was a badger that had been run over and two others were trying to drag its body up a small bank back into the undergrowth.
I've seen owls, foxes, deer, cats, rabbits, ducks, swans & bats out on my night rides, it's quite something speeding along a cyclepath in the dark with bats out feeding along it, occasionally swooping so low over your head you can feel the air from their wings!
Oh and I feed wild magpies by putting bits of food out on my bedroom windowsill - I could never live in a town or city.
"The saddest night wildlife sight I saw was a badger that had been run over and two others were trying to drag its body up a small bank back into the undergrowth"
Let's consider why this could be 'sad'
1) The bager's mates were taking him to the vets
2) The badger's mates decided to bury him
3) the badger's mates were hoping he'd get better
4) the badger's mates were fighting over who would have dinner
Sometimes there's nothing as cruel as nature.
"the badger's mates were fighting over who would have dinner
Sometimes there's nothing as cruel as nature."
A long time ago I worked for a biological supplier. One of the products was dead (and pickled n formalin) rats fro school practicals. Sometimes rats escaped so we had a rat problem. The head of microscopy (prepared microscope slides were another product) decided to do a bit of culling after hours & brought in an air rifle. After shooting one of the rats he realised rat blood would have trypanosomes - good for a few slides - and went off to get a syringe. When he came back the rest of the rats had dragged it off to eat.
Have you met Ron Davies on your travels?
Also, I discovered if you're stood still being absolutely quiet and a badger is walking in your direction and you don't want to make it run off in a blind panic, make loud breathing sounds through your nose and it'll realise something is there then turn round and saunter back a different direction.
Blind panic? Let me introduce you to Gary. It was one night/morning in the wee small hours and I had, yet again, lost track of time obsessing over another project in the workshop. As usually happens when one realises it's 3AM and the world is almost silent, the old ears started picking up softer sounds, one of which was a snuffling and rustling sound coming from the driveway. Dispensing with the usual thoughts of The Thing and remembering we don't live in the Antarctic, I ventured out to find out what the giddy frig was going on.
My word, a bin bag moving on its own! If we had these a long time ago it would have saved me many an evening lugging fetid waste away from more civilised areas. No such luck, though, because inside this one was Gary. I called him Gary because, upon disengaging from his foraging, he looked at me like I had just spilled his pint, rose up about six inches and you could just hear the bugger:
"What you lookin' at, mate? You want a knuckle butty?"
Whether he had an XR3i convertible and was cohabiting a sett with his skanky girlfriend and six brats I never found out; he looked as if he could back up the attitude so I made a polite withdrawal from the scene. As I left I'm pretty sure I caught sight of an Elizabeth Duke sovereign ring, though...
he looked as if he could back up the attitude
Remember - badgers are mustelids (sometimes called the weasel family - includes otters, honey badgers and wolverines) and none of the group are known for their shy and retiring personalities (except maybe Pine Martens and otters).
I suspect, as CrazyOldCatMan points out, Gary had some residual honey badger genes. I must admit my testes felt a little vulnerable...
I have no problem with badgers and I really wish people would stop running them over; it's not as if they're hard to spot. Just thought the Gary anecdote, which actually happened and no amount of commenting to the contrary about the natural temperament of badgers is going to change this one's Geordie Friday night attitude, was fitting. I saw Gary a time or two afterwards and often left him a few treats as a peace offering. The offerings were inevitably accepted by something, the peace was conditional on my staying the hell out of his way. I don't think he liked the idea of a nocturnal human.
Rural North Wales. Y moch daear (earth pigs) around here are pretty brave.
Chronos, love the tale of Gary, I've a bit more to add to my badger encounter tales.
Walking up a hill at night one time I heard this continual loud banging of wooden door, it was 3am, a little looking around I figured out it was a door in a high walled garden accessible from a long tarmac public path with a streetlamp half way up. I stopped at the bottom and waited to see what on earth was going on, a couple of minutes later the banging stopped and I saw a badger trundling along under the streetlight.
I guess its normal foraging route had been blocked, which is what happened to us, in that many years ago we'd often put out food near our back door for badgers, sometimes when I came home late at night I'd scare the crap out of them as I turned the corner, until they stopped visiting regularly because someone had secured the fence on their property, altering their night forage route.
However they do still go through our garden occasionally, as evident by the holes dug in the grass, and last summer coming home from a night ride I had to sit and cool down before going inside, heard a noise in the garden direction, turned on my torch to see the head of a badger poking up from the steps leading down to the garden :)
... I'd have had a better excuse to share a favourite quote:
"It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well."—Terry Pratchett
Second, indoor cats live on average twice as long as outdoor cats
Maybe in countries where the wildlife includes large cats and wolves/coyotes but my experience (previous cats, all of whom had free access to the outside) ages at death were:
16, 22, 24, 18, 17, 18, 17, 17, 18
So unless you can produce a whole lot of cats that lived into their 30s and 40s I'd say that your assertion doesn't match current data..
(And locking the cat door at night kinda negates the whole purpose of having a cat door..)
I've got experience with only one cat, and she had to stand at the door and meow to be let in or out so she was only out all night a few times (probably someone let her into their house, fed her, and couldn't figure out how to get her to leave!) and she lived to almost 22.
I've got friends who let their cats out, and they haven't died early either. I think this is a bullshit made up statistic by someone who likes birds or found cat poop in their kid's sandbox. There's no reasonable way cats could live only half as long having access to the outside, unless half of them are getting run over when young!
Our parrots go absolutely wild for potato, whether it's mashed, boiled or chips (french fries), but their favorite is unsalted potato crisps! They can spot the bag from the other side of the room.
Mind you, our Ducorps cockatoo behaved very strangely if given orange, especially satsuma. It behaved almost as if it were drunk!
Gosport is overrun with badgers. There's a sett at the bottom of our garden and badgers are regular visitors into the house if the back door is left open or if the cat flap is on the wrong setting. We were woken by the noise of a badger in the bathroom once (upstairs!). I can vouch for how much mess and chaos they can cause. Our cats just sit and watch. They'll happily walk around you if you're sitting in the garden and don't seem bothered by human voices but make any noise with your feet and they all scurry away.
Disappointed to see the link to the Gosport newspaper includes a fbclid - it's unnecessary, superfluous and enables tracking.
On topic, my microchip catflap has successfully kept out everything that my cats couldn't carry through it. Admittedly that's merely seen by them as a challenge but they haven't brought in a whole badger yet.