MEET THE ANIMALS

Here's a short introduction to the other animals on our farm:


THE CATS

This is Whisper
Whisper is an indoor/outdoor cat.  If he sprays in my house again, he'll be an outdoor/outdoor cat!  He was given to me by a girl at work.  He'll be neutered in a couple of weeks.  Hopefully that will help with the spraying.  I think that if I was a cat and someone neutered me, I'd stop just about everything!  Just in case.  I could only get one pic of the barn cats because they aren't around when I want them to be.  This one appears to be the sentry:

 We probably have 8 or 9 barn cats.  All of them are black or black and white.  Like our other animals, they sleep.  A lot.  Some farmers don't feed their cats cat food, so they'll catch the mice and rats that eat the grain in the barn.  We do feed our cats cat food, and cow's milk that's left over.   For the most part, our cats are pretty healthy.  The tomcats are huge!  I've actually seen Tommy (original for a tomcat! again, I didn't name him) laying on a bale of hay in the barn  and when a mouse ran past, he just yawned, stretched and turned the other way!

MY CHICKEN HOUSE

These guys are in my back yard.  I love my chickens and duck.  I used to have 3 more male ducks and a couple of roosters.  Waaay too much testosterone in the chicken yard!  The males were mounting anything that moved.  They were pulling the feathers off of the backs of the chickens and my female duck.  My friend Adaira took my male ducks to a beautiful little farm with a lake and the ducks love it there.  We won't discuss what happened to the roosters.  That's a farm secret that I don't want to know about.  I can tell you that we don't eat our animals!  They are our pets.  In my mind, the roosters are hanging out at a huge chicken farm somewhere happily fertilizing eggs all day long!  The remaining duck is Lola.  She has her own little swimming pool that she loves!  She also likes it when I spray her with the hose.  The chickens do not.  I can't remember the names of all of the chickens.  They all come to "Here chicky chicky!"  So does Lola, for that matter.  So did the male ducks that Adaira took to the other farm.  I told her to let the gentleman know that was how he had to call them!


THE BUNNY
This is Petey.  OK, I did name him.  I got him about 5 years ago at the Washington County fair.  He is such a sweet rabbit.

 He's also a spoiled rabbit.  He has a winter home and a summer gazebo:

Oh....Petey likes to swim!




















THE COWS

Finally, there are the cows.  My husband is a 3rd generation dairy farmer.  We're a pretty small dairy with a total of just 38 cows.  Most of our cows are holsteins (the black and white ones!), but we do have some jerseys (little brown cows), angus (beef cows), and now Ed is mixing in some brown swiss.  Here are some of our cows.

Many times, we end up with orphaned or injured animals that we try to help get back to their environment.  We've had birds, chipmunks, a baby raccoon, bunnies, a turtle...you name it!  

But, by far, everyone's favorite is Amos.  We'll talk about him next time...