Since we moved in to this house, almost two years ago, we have had a running battle with every cat in the parish.<\/p>\n
The house, you see, was a brand spanking new build.<\/p>\n
Prior to being underneath a house, the plot of land was just an open plot of land.<\/p>\n
So every cat in the parish, for the last three thousand years, has been coming to this corner of the countryside for its daily dump, twice-daily piss and nightly shag.<\/p>\n
But now there’s a house here. A house with beautifully tended gardens. Gardens that are surrounded by 2m-high, wood-panelled fencing.<\/p>\n
2m-high, wood-panelled fencing which, unfortunately, the dumping, pissing, shagging cats have been scaling, in order to continue their dumping, pissing and shagging activities.<\/p>\n
In our garden.<\/p>\n
Mythbuster #1:<\/strong> Mythbuster #2:<\/strong> Mythbuster #3:<\/strong> So the cats need to be controlled.<\/p>\n They need to be stopped from climbing over the fences and coming in to our garden.<\/p>\n But how?<\/p>\n If they were dogs or goats or horses or rats or frogs or giraffes, I could ring up West Oxfordshire District Council and the matter would be taken care of.<\/p>\n But cats, apparently, are exempt the same rules of behaviour and containment that applies to dogs and goats and horses and rats (etc).<\/p>\n Which, frankly, is weird.<\/p>\n Because why should we have to put up with the feral, roaming, pissing, dumping, shagging exploits of someone else’s pets?<\/p>\n Why should pet-owners be expected to have no control over their pets?<\/p>\n I have written to the local newspaper asking cat-owners to consider the problem.<\/p>\n I have written to a national newspaper (the Daily Mail), setting out my dilemma.<\/p>\n I have written to the RSPCA asking for their thoughts on the problem.<\/p>\n All three organisations have chosen to ignore me – probably dismissed me as a crank, either not realising the scale of the problem, or not wishing to address the elephant in the room that is the lack of control of cats.<\/p>\n And yet, when the Daily Mail recently published a story about a gardener who put down poison to stop invading cats from destroying his crop – and I commented, in understanding tones, in favour of his actions – the gardener (and I) were both ostracised by Daily Mail commenters.<\/p>\n Hmmm…<\/p>\n We have tried various things to keep the furry vermin from pissing, dumping and shagging in our garden – even though it seems totally bizarre that we are forced to spend money to control someone else’s pet!<\/p>\n But the nice, friendly solutions have all failed.<\/p>\n However, a well-aimed handful of stone scalpings seems to be paying dividends.<\/p>\n Whenever one of the pissing, dumping, shagging little darlings appears in the garden, they get bombarded, courtesy of my best cricket-ball-throwing arm, with a painful warning not to return.<\/p>\n And do you know something?<\/p>\n The message is slowly getting through.<\/p>\n So this morning I’m sitting in my lounge, with the french doors open, watching a pair of pigeons and a handful of smaller birds hopping around the garden looking for food.<\/p>\n And that’s something that we are seeing more of.<\/p>\n And I like this scene.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since we moved in to this house, almost two years ago, we have had a running battle with every cat in the parish. The house,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nCats do not bury their shit. They leave their smelly parcels of poo all over the place, just waiting for some unsuspecting foot to descend upon them. Also, cat shit is not odourless.<\/p>\n
\nCat piss is also not odourless. It stinks to high heaven. In warm weather our garden smells worse than a public convenience at Glastonbury music festival – after a weekend of full-on toilet-related action.<\/p>\n
\nCats do not shag quietly at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon. They creep around the garden at 2am yowling in heat, as if someone had run a stake through one of their limbs. Which, frankly, is what I feel like doing – at that time of the day.<\/p>\n