s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Just a quick update: The tests have come back negative for Feluke and FIV; now we just need the peritonitis to come back clean. Her cough-gurgle-wheeze is improving, and her softball is melting away (she mostly just looks like a fat kitten now). You can no longer feel her spine and hips as starkly, and she’s actually slowed down how much she’s eating. Probably she’s figured out that if she doesn’t eat it NOW, she really can come back and eat it LATER. Really.

She’s way more active now than she was the fiRst couple of days, when she was doing a lot of sleeping. Her hunting lessons have progressed from Run-Over-It and Jump-And-Grab-It, through Attack-It-From-Ambush and Jump-Over-Legs-To-Get-To-It, to Climb-Up-Stuff-To-Get-It (she’s a little shaky on this last, and on the Jumping Over Things one. I suspect she may end up like Slow Top — not much of a climber or jumper… we’ll see).

It’s really good to see her active & I hope the tests come back and her cough clears up soon, so she can play with the other cats — I don’t know how long we’ll be able to keep up with her.

So yesterday I decided to finally put in the gate between our place and the neighbor to the south, Steve. We wanted to do this so we could use how cows to eat some of the really long grass we have, especially on the back hill where it is more than waist high. (This sort of grazing is actually good for the pastures, and using multiple species allows them to vacuum-up each others parasites and keeps everything cleaner.)

This would also give Steve’s cows a good feed, as they have been living on “fresh air and great scenery” for the last few months.

So about 7:30 I cut the fence so I could start digging in the strainer posts. About 20 minutes later a cow head peers around the bush beside me. I swear an evil gleam came into its eye as its little bovine brain exclaimed “there is a gap in the fence!” The cows, which normally are a bit shy, then proceeded to walk right by me through the gap to our side. I stopped trying to hold them back when it became apparent that they would simply try to climb through the now-slack fence. The only problem was the traffic jam when the first cow through immediately stopped in the long grass and started snarfing. A bit of arm-waving got them all through. So now we have 7 cows happily eating the long grass in Gallop. This weekend we will probably move them back to the Hill, where they can stay for a month or so.

This is an “everyone wins” scenario. Steve gets free feed for his cows, letting them gain some needed weight before heading off to the works. We get some pasture management, plus we gain brownie points with Steve. This is good, as he has lots of fun toys. We are going to borrow his digger in a few weeks to knowck down the kennels. That should be fun.