[tri-med] Re: Miss P's 'Coyote Alarms' - not for the squimish!!!

>>...  I just don't worry about her quirks anymore...oh, and her 
>>tambourine 'coyote alarms' remain on the door knobs still too....

>That story always brought a smile to my face, I just marvelled at her 
>ingenuity! Tell it again for the new folk Fawna.

We moved this 'city girl' to a farm on the edge of Escondido when she 
was 18 yrs old.  Prior to that she had spent her entire life living in the 
same house in a relatively quiet cul-de-sac in the bottom of a canyon in 
East San Diego.  Now we had 'citified coyotes' who lived in our canyon too, 
but in 18+ years we'd never lost a single cat to one of them.  And that's
really saying something, because I did feral and stray cat rescue work there,
and had upwards to 20 some odd cats at times.  Anyhoo, at the time of the
move we took 7 cats with us, and the previous owner had left 2 more behind
when she moved to Mexico, for a total of 9 that we started with in 6/'01.
Now logic told us that if there were 2 cats living okay outside here already,
we shouldn't have a problem.  And we didn't seem too.

But 2 weeks later we left for the SOFT Conference in Boston, and our older 
daughter was checking in on the cats for us in our absence.  By the time we
got home though we were already down several cats, though there was no
evidence of any foul play.   And by September we only had 3 left, but still no
tale-tale evidence to the contrary that they weren't just annoyed with us for
banning them from the new carpet and hitting the road for greener pastures.
They were ALL strays to begin with after all!

However all of that changed in September.  I remember walking out the back
door that morning to the laundry room, and noticing that Bandit wasn't laying
on the sawhorse in the breeze way as usual.  But I thought maybe he was 
just off chasing ground squirrels in the pasture.  It was a really beautiful 
day,
with predictions of warm Santa Ana winds by afternoon.  Now for anyone who
doesn't know what a Santa Ana is, they're hot air off the desert that can and
often do, blow the aluminum sheeting off the llama shelter, even though it's 
nailed down, and once even took down a 100' eucalyptus tree in our front yard.

Philina had a dentist appointment that afternoon, so Bandit was the least of my 
worries that day.  Let's just say she's not the most cooperative patient Dr Mary
has.  Anyway by the time we pulled back in our drive way, a long dirt lane past
the pasture, she was already semi traumatized.  But the semi part came to an 
abrupt end when the Santa Ana winds suddenly blew copious amounts of very
notibly Bandit fur, just fur, in front of our car.  That's all she ever saw, 
but it's
all she needed to see at that point to be totally traumatized.  And her mother
wasn't doing much better when I gather up the parts, just parts, of my cat from
the pasture.  

That was the first night that Philina spent sleeping in the middle of the 
living room 
floor at this house.  And she flat out would NOT sleep in her room after that 
until 
we came home from the hospitalization for her valve transplant 
12/11/01-3/16/02.  
And along with sleeping on the floor, she started hanging the tambourines on 
the 
door knobs so nothing bad could get in without her hearing it.

We mostly have indoor cats now, carpet be d*mned, but we do always still have a 
handful of outdoor ones around here too between defective Bengals and new 
strays.
And several still do disappear per year without a trace, but only that one year 
the 
coyotes left evidence...twice.


Fawna, mom to Philina 23 yrs (PT6p & Moya Moya), 
Philina's Pharm Bengal Cattery, Escondido, CA USA
http://home.mindspring.com/~fawna33/
                  Building ___ooOOoo__ Rainbows
                       www.trisomyonline.org
                  Families Helping Families On-line

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