We have a lot of stray cats come and go. Some are drop offs--they will like to live in the country. Some are just chased off of farms etc. If they look like house rejects that people just got tired of, I take them to the humane society. I have to pay a fee because I am outside of the city limits. But some cats just don't belong in the 'country'. Some get fed by default because Bonneroo does not always clean his plate. But Bonneroo does NOT want permanent barn guests.
I’ve named ‘em. Skinny, Fat cat, Scar and Cali. Why? Cause Skinny is skinny, Fat cat is fat, Scar has some missing hair on his butt and Cali is a calico. I think Yvonne has already reported that Skinny is a female with 3 kittens and all have recently adopted the front porch as their night time abode. (so much so that they were using one of Yvonne’s flower trays as their loo) Last night they started making a statement about what time I need to vacate the porch because around 9 PM, the kittens would dart in, see me and then scamper off the porch. Until… I grabbed the last fried chicken leg out of the fridge last night and after consuming what I wanted, I put the bone with the cartilage on the deck thinking Skinny or one of the other adults would cart it off. Nope. No more than a couple of minutes after I put the bone down, one of the kittens came up to see if I was still here, saw the bone and attacked it which brought up another yellow kitten who took it’s position on the other side of the bone never minding if I was here or not. One kitten, a more aggressive one, decided it was his and grabbed the bone in the middle and took it under a chair leaving the other kitten to take its position under another chair presumably to wait until it’s brother / sister was finished. Long story shorted, I guess they are all getting used to me. After a couple of months of feeding them, the only one that is completely receptive of me is Skinny but at a distance that she determines. If the cat dish is empty, she’ll approach me and let me know that i need to get up and go get her some food but that’s about as friendly as she’s gotten so far. Cali is a little different though. She’s skittish and will make a bee-line off the porch if I stand up and will not approach the cat food unless it’s a couple of feet from me when I am sitting down but yet, if I am eating something she’ll walk clear of the distanced cat food, come up to me and wait until I present a portion to her and she’ll take it from my fingers. No petting though, just feeding. Me thinks my hand will come back as a nub if I attempt to pet her.
Feral actually means and animal that was once domesticated and has become "wild". My wife worked for a vet once who told her, "Feral cats and dogs are a problem, but the biggest problem is feral women."
Feral cats are indeed domestic cats that have reverted to a wild state. They were either born in the wild or have lived there for an extended period. Feral cats are generally fearful of people and will avoid close contact. They have never been or are no longer socialized to human interaction. There is a big difference between a domesticated cat that has reverted to a feral state and one that has never been domesticated, however. Stray cats are domesticated cats that have become lost or abandoned. They were once socialized to people and may approach people for food or attention. They are more comfortable around people than feral cats. They still exhibit some domestic behaviors, such as seeking shelter or interacting with people. The reason that I use stray/feral to describe these cats is that they did not approach me for help. Rather, my cameras recorded them digging through my compost pile for food, along with raccoons and skunks, so I quit putting meat in the compost pile and started leaving food out for the cats. Over a period of years, they began associating me with the food that I left on the back porch, and, last winter, they began coming into our porch after I left the sliding door open just enough for them to enter, and I began feeding them there instead. From the start, though, they would stop when I called to them using the commonly used word "Kitty," and that's why I have concluded that they were once someone's cat or kitten. Now, they have come to know when I am telling them that I am going to get them some food. When I inadvertenly open the door while either the black or the gray cat are eating from the bowl in our porch, the cat will run, but if I say, "That's okay, kitty. You can eat, it will come back and eat as long as I am no longer on its side of the door. Although it is applied to abandoned cats, the term "stray" suggests that they walked away from their home and got lost, and I doubt that's the case with either the black or the gray cat. The others, who appear on camera eating from the bowls of food that I leave out, I have had no interaction with, and don't even see except on camera, so I will assume they are more feral than the other two.