Sheepcats

I have found another way to make our fortune. Training cats to herd sheep. It’s possible. Like many of history’s great inventions – pencillin, H bombs – using cats to herd sheep came to me by accident. Our two feral cats, Marmalade and Clementine, who live in the hay barn – have started to herd our pet sheep.

Now, it helps if you have tame sheep to start with of course, but my business plan allows for the loan of two tame sheep for each training course. People will have to provide their own cats. M&C Cat (yah yah Maurice and Charles) are fed at the same time as the sheep, and in the same place, at least while the weather is shite. So they turn out with the sheep to wait for their food. Now they’re not scared of the sheep, and vice versa, they’ve started herding.

I have to fine-tune the training process, but I think it’s a winner.   

What isn’t is the regular imposition of other people’s cats searching for M&C’s food. Last year we had a fat ginger tom we called Minger who dominated our two, ate their food and nearly killed one of them. He has been adopted by Zoe and Steph down the lane. Now we’ve got a whacking great white tom. No name yet but I’m working on that. And he’s started spaying in the barn so the hay stinks of cat piss. I think I may call him Arsehole. It makes me feel better when I’m chucking sticks at him shouting ‘fuck off Arsehole’.

On which subject, Hilary, the Mother pig, is in heat again. Which means she smells me coming a mile off, breaks out of anywhere she happens to be, and gallops (lollops really) towards me. Then she just leans against me, waiting for a shag. This is not something I particularly care for. Apart from anything else, I have to fix all the fences she breaks through in the heat of her passion. And I don’t like being fancied by half a ton of ugly pig.