Two words

[GerryW]

Beautiful , our youngest daughter ( 40 plus :smiling2: ) would love him/her has a whole herd of them , at least 15 live outside in the summer and cut the grass .

Ever read the short story "Pigs is Pigs" (it's available now as a free e-book)? I always remember that when people talk about guinea pigs!

[Guest]

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The back door was open at a quarter past eleven last night because it was still warm outside, and the screen door has a hole cut in it so the cats can still get in and out. Seems someone other than they discovered that too.

One of the cats didn’t know what to make of this. It was his behaviour that first alerted to there being something strange going on.

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He’s familiar with hedgehogs, and is clearly wary of them. I think he was upset a bit and confused that he couldn’t eat anything himself like this.

The hedgehog, of course, also wasn’t too comfortable with all of this, so he ended up sitting very still in the cat’s food bowl, with his head down and his spines up. After a while of leaving him alone, when he still hadn’t moved, I carefully got my hand under his belly (he hadn’t curled up completely) and lifted him out to put him back outside, by the saucer with cat food that’s there exactly for these fellows (there are at least two that come into the garden).

[Tim Marlow]

Great stuff Jakko. Hedge pigs have become quite rare in the UK since I was a nipper! Good looking mackerel tabby as well….very like our old boy that died recently, down to the notched ear….

[Guest]

Hedge pigs have become quite rare in the UK since I was a nipper!

I don’t really remember ever seeing them until some years ago, when several seem to have taken up residence in my neighbourhood.

Good looking mackerel tabby as well….very like our old boy that died recently, down to the notched ear….

Thanks. He didn’t have that notch in his ear initially, so I suppose he got into a fight at some point. How he did that I kind of wonder, though, as he’s not exactly the bravest cat I’ve ever seen

His predecessors died in June 2017 and January 2018, so he arrived here a week and a half after the latter when he was about five months old, together with his adoptive mother of (at a guess) two to three years at the time. Apparently, she had been brought into an animal shelter after having been found in a cardboard box at a motorway rest area, with a nest of her kittens. It’s kind of assumed she had been dumped there by previous owners, but I think a likely alternative is that she picked that box as a safe place for her young. Still, she’s clearly used to people and not a wild cat, so how she ended up there is anyone’s guess. Anyway, when the kittens had gone, the animal shelter had another one in need of a mother (they didn’t tell me the reason) so he got put with her. Three years later, she’s sometimes a bit cautious of him, probably because he’s a good deal bigger, and she doesn’t seem to realise that he is the one who backs down when he thinks she doesn’t want him around.

[Tim Marlow]

Ours used to fight the street bully cat all the time……in the end they went for a mutual avoidance strategy so neither lost their street cred!