the black cat
Our garden is being terrorized by a black cat.
I've written about it before in these pages. It's apparently a feral cat who first appeared in the winter, and is now seen in our back garden on almost a daily basis. At first it wore a pink collar but now that has disappeared. According to Tricia that is the type collar that the SPCA puts on their animals, so we theorize that someone in the neighborhood possibly picked it as a pet and then let it escape. Somewhere along the line too it lost part of it's tail.
My wife puts out a dish of food on the back porch for our garden cat. She got left behind by a family who were leasing a house down the road one year and has been settled in our back garden for many years now. Our indoor cats accept her as part of the tribe.
However the garden cat has been in numerous altercations with the black cat and Sam has come in a couple times with bites and scratches too. Consequently we have issues with the black cat and regard it as a trouble-maker. We're contemplating taking some kind of action against it but we don't have a plan yet.
What has me wondering lately though is how this situation came about. We've had other visitors to the garden before - raccoons and possums - who the cats accepted. Why are they hostile toward this one? I see them watching us for cues when the black cat is spotted, so I know that part of the answer is because they feel our hostility. But didn't our feelings originate out of concern for their welfare, after the hostilities had already began?
How did the black cat become demonized into The Evil One instead of being peaceably integrated into the community? Is it something inherent in the nature of the black cat, or is the cat just a victim of our hostility toward it? It is probably hungry and frightened and just trying to make it's way in the world as best it can. Did it all escalate from a bad move in an early encounter?
