For those of you who follow me and the Farm on Facebook, Jet is a frequent character in the saga of the farm.

I am not a cat person and I don’t play one on TV. I like cats well enough. And when the stray came to the door when I was a teenager and stayed for the next 15 years I was happy. Teen age girls and cats… But between life circumstances early in my early adult years and a very allergic husband in later years (as well as dogs that would consider a cat a snack, not a companion) I never really got to know cats like I know dogs. This became apparent when I was interim director at the humane society. There I was, darn good at understanding dogs and all their moods, but patently clueless as I helped staff restrain cats. I noticed over time that, while I was always on call to help with the dogs,  they asked for help less and less frequently with the cats. It was probably self-preservation on the staff’s part. I respect and admire felines but I don’t have that almost instant communication that I feel with most dogs.

When we bought the farm, I realized that  if I was to protect our barn from order Rodentia, that a cat was necessary. I approached Lowell Humane Society and suggested that if they had a cat who just couldn’t live indoors because of house breaking problems, fear, or whatever, who was willing to live in a barn that I had a job for him or her. I didn’t care what the cat looked like (though a long hair was out because of the inevitable grooming challenges). I didn’t care whether or not the cat was friendly as long as I could catch it once a year to get it to its annual vet visits. It could pee and poop anywhere since it was going to have 75 acres to roam. All it *needed* to do was be a mouser and stick by the barn. What they came up with was Jet, one of the most mentally sound animals I have had the privilege to know.

So, why did they give me Jet? Well, she had bounced in and out of the shelter a few times because she refused to stay inside. Absolutely, adamantly refused. Knowing Jet as I know her now, I can see why she was completely unsuited to the typical American indoor cat life. She is a lovely social cat but she has a mind of her own.

For her first two weeks last fall, I kept her locked in the barn. I wanted her to own the space – and that she did. She rubbed on every conceivable surface. None of the pasture animals had come in yet and she had not met them. At about week 2 or 3 of her tenancy, I had the two little bucklings neutered and tucked them in the brand new barn to keep them safe. Jet retreated to the rafters for TWO days. She sat on the farthest ledge from the bucklings (who by the way were mostly sleeping it off) and stared at them. I am quite sure she was there for almost two days because her food was untouched and her litter box was amazingly clean. My first thought was “oooh boy, this isn’t going to work out, cat has to be able to adjust to the farm animals.” After all, her sole purpose at the farm is to keep the barn rodent free. Abject terror of barn animals was not a good sign.

However, after due consideration of the invasion of the bucklings, she came down from her perch and decided that she could at least reclaim most of the barn as her own. Shortly thereafter,  as I started bringing animals in and letting her out I worried that she might take off. After all, she was pretty freaked out those first few days.  I brought the rest of the goats  in at night because the weather was getting cold.

They were pretty stunned. None had seen a cat before – but she clearly had decided that ruminants were not going to ruin her fun. And so she stared them down. By the way, staring seven Nigerian dwarf goats down is no mean feat. Ask Jura, my herding dog. They definitely give you a run for your money. Soon, if she was out and about when we were bringing the goats in to the barn, she could stop them dead in their tracks just by standing her ground.

After the first snow, I brought the sheep and the llama in. By this time, Jet was swatting curious goats who stuck their noses through the fencing into the aisle. The sheep took her aback for a few days but she and Joe, the llama, seemed to develop an almost instant bond. She would sit on a post that put her at llama level and they would sniff each other. Sometimes they “hang out” together for quite sometime. Theirs seems a most companionable relationship.

One day, one of the little goats got into the aisle and she swatted him on the butt. Clearly, the aisle was her sacred territory. No ruminants allowed. I happen to agree with her. She would go into the areas with the sheep and goats and wander through. Occasionally a sheep or goat would try to butt her, and she would scoot along. But she always left with her dignity intact.

Meanwhile outside the barn, she was getting to know Jura, the herding dog. He is just a little intimidated by her. They have developed a little game where he circles her at a distance. She looks all huffy. But when in close quarters, they ignore each other. She is cautious about showing herself when the other dogs are loose but she knows what a leash is and is frighteningly bold when she knows that a dog is on a leash. If there is a dog on leash, she strolls along as if there is no dog present at all.  I suppose that is a “city cat” thing.

As lambing season rolled around, all of her sheep companions who had been quite content about

having her around suddenly started to turn on her. Momma hormones are a powerful thing and they would butt at her whenever she got anywhere near their lambs. But Jet continued to hang out, usually in a sheep inaccessible place, and commune with her ruminant companions. Sometimes I found her lounging in the barnyard with the ewes and their lambs, in a corner where she could quickly escape should one of the ewes suddenly determine that a sunning cat was an imminent danger to her offspring.

At night however, Jet disappeared into the woods. I struggled for a while about whether I should crate her at night. In the end, I decided that she might have a short life (we have fox, coyote, fisher cats and all the rest) but that she was not a cat to take to confinement. Her life, however short or long, would be a good life. As long as she kept the barn in order, I would have to accept that she had her own ideas about how she spent her free time.

Just about every human who has come to the farm has had to commune with Jet. Like my Border Collie Rose ( who prefers schmoozing men to herding sheep) she seems to think that people were created to entertain her. She has pushed lambs out of my lap to take her rightful place. And she has designs on finding a way into the house even though two of the dogs would eat her at a moment’s notice.

Jet sometimes accompanies me on farm chores like a dog might. The other day Al and I walked a good 800 feet down the driveway to repair a spot in the fence. She walked all the way down, hung out with us while we made the repair and then walked back with us. She follows Jura and me out to herding practice. She has even tried it herself.

The sheep aren’t quite sure what to make of her. And she really hasn’t perfected her outrun. But, in keeping with her personality, she is always up for trying new things.

Because she is such a companionable cat, I have worried about the spring transitions and how she might get lonely. The goats are all in Belmont at the Audubon Society now. The sheep now spend their days and nights with their guardian Joe in the pastures.  I put the sheep out in the front pasture at first. For a while when I went to the barn to feed Jet in the morning she would appear from the direction of the front pasture. I didn’t think much of it, because she is a mighty huntress and there are woods and streams and rodentia a plenty that way. A few days ago, I moved the sheep to the middle pasture. Suddenly Jet is hunting and spending time in the woods between the barnyard and that pasture. Last night, in fact, I was late to penning the sheep in the night time area and Jet lept out of the woods and startled my cousin and me as we walked to the pasture. Nothing like a black cat after dark to get your heart racing. So, it appears that Jet has solved her own problem of being a lonely barn cat. She is still hanging with her peeps, which in this case are her sheep. Hunting is just as good in these woods.

This afternoon, I went to the barn. She was deep into her afternoon nap. I sat down and she curled up in my lap for a nap. She really doesn’t get much attention from me but she readily accepts it when the opportunity presents itself.

Jet has made me think a lot about resilience. Except for our dog Alex who died several years ago, I think she is the most resilient animal I have owned. Things do phase her. The goats were quite a shock. Her eyes were like saucers those first days. Now with spring,  suddenly her barn companions aren’t coming into the barn. She shocked herself on the electrinetting one day and disappeared for hours. But then she finds a way to solve her own problems. I can only speculate what combination of nature and nurture laid the firm foundation for this transition from city cat to queen of the barnyard. When I think of cats I don’t generally think “open to new experiences”. But Jet seems to be just that. She is open to new people, to new animals, to new hunting grounds. She is not fearless or fierce but she doesn’t cower. She doesn’t respond with hostility or posturing unless it is called for. She has an agile brain which she applies to the circumstance at hand and learns from her experiences. She can tell the difference between the dogs as individuals and responds to each differently.

My experiences with her have made me think all the more about what we ask and expect of our pet animals. Over the past ten years, I have thought about just how much our animals give up of their essential nature in order to fit into our lives. I certainly know many cats, who given the opportunity to hunt or lie on the couch, would choose the couch. And I know plenty of dogs who are quite happy in their lives. But as I watch the animals around the farm, my dogs included, I realize how impoverished our pets’ lives often are and how frequently we underestimate their intelligence because it isn’t of the type that humans possess. Everytime I send Jura out on an outrun to collect his sheep that are scattered about, I realize that he can read sheep better than I  ever will.

Jet is a smart cat. She is a resilient being. I believe that she has some sort of a sense of humor when she messes with the dog and the goats. She has found her own way here on the farm in ways that I could not have expected. And she is one of  the most well adjusted animals I have ever met.  This is a cat, who was rejected thrice by human families before she came to live here. She couldn’t adapt to her life as an indoor city cat. I can see why she would have been miserable in such a

constrained life. I can only imagine the ways in which she told her person in no uncertain terms that indoor life was not the life for her. She must have been impossible to live with. We so often blame the animal for not adjusting and thinking that there is something “wrong” with him or her because it doesn’t fit into our lifestyle. We then “diagnose” the animal as having a problem – when maybe the problem is with the environment or our expectations.

My mind always drifts next to the environment that we provide for human children. More and more we are diagnosing children with ADHD and other “diseases” because they are not adapting well to the environment into which we force them to live. But maybe, we need to stop and look. Perhaps they, like Jet, are responding to an unreasonable set of expectations. We want them to be couch cats when they are natural hunters. Maybe it is the environment that we have created that isn’t so healthy. Maybe, given the right environment they would thrive and we would find them quite resilient and adaptable. I could go on and on about how we have taken away serendipity and opportunities for spontaneous learning and how in the name of safety we have removed risk and thus the opportunity to learn how to adapt. For all our technological toys and structured activities, I sometimes wonder if we are impoverishing our children by not exposing them to the unexpected. We have done the same for our pets. But that is an entirely different blog entry.

As a dog trainer, I often recommend that people get puzzles and toys for their dogs. I suggest they do training of tricks or a sport to exercise their dogs’ minds. With the advent of the sport of nosework (where a dog gets to use its nose, a sensory tool that we can not even begin to appreciate), I recommend that people try it with their dogs, if only to open the humans’ eyes to how differently a dog perceives the world. I suggest ways to enhance their environment. But I sometimes fear (well let’s be honest – often fear) that all that isn’t really enough. I fear that people aren’t really looking at the amazing creature before them. Part of the reason that we don’t see the amazing creature before us, is our own self-absorption. We humans are so conditioned to believe that we have dominion over the earth (even those of us who reject that notion, rarely cease that behavior in practice, myself included, hobby farmer that I am). And we think of our intelligence as “the” intelligence.  Part of it, for many people, may be our lack of the observation skills and knowledge that would enable us to really see the animal. But as I watch Jet, I realize that the cat that was turned in to the shelter once and returned twice, would not have shown her true self in an indoor setting. She is at her finest with a flock of sheep, a herd of goats, her own llama with whom to consult on all things farm, a few dogs with whom she can mess, farm visitors with whom she can schmooze and a wide world of small rodents. She has thrived on mastering her new environment. She is an amazing creature. But so too is every other cat on the planet.