Tiny, the Tease

Tiny was a feral cat when we moved out here. She ended up trapped in the crawl space when the pre-sale house inspection was done, and spent two weeks teasing the house cat through the furnace registers.

We had a mare foal for the first time and refuse to nurse her baby, so we had to feed him by nasogastric tube every hour for the first week of his life. Tiny would hiss and spit at us from 40 feet away when we went to "her" barn to care for the foal. She was thin and pregnant, so I started taking food to her and leaving a bowl of milk when we left the barn. She gradually came closer and one day I stroked her back. The next day it was two strokes, and after a week, I brought her to the house to have her kittens in a safe environment.

Tiny likes hunting birds and mice in the machine shed and barn. She loves to tease the dogs when they are turned out, and she knows which ones she can saunter up to and get so close they can sniff her. She knows which ones will kill her too. One day a pit bull spotted her and kept jumping on the fence trying to get to her while she sat on the truck and nodded her head up and down in rhythm to the jumping dog.

We put in a motion detector security light on the office, and she and two of her partners in crime (Cotton and Radar) deliberately set it off at least three times every night. They have also discovered how to trip the driveway monitor, and that's fun for awhile in the middle of the afternoon.

Tonight she ambushed me on the way to the house from the kennel. She was taking the blankets off the clothesline - something she does routinely - and decided to grab my pant leg on the way by. Her goal was to get me to give her a special treat, and sucker that I am, I did just that.