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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] mice, voles, rodents, oh my!

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  • From: Pat Meadows <pat@meadows.pair.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] mice, voles, rodents, oh my!
  • Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:24:02 -0400

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 08:21:28 -0400, you wrote:


>
>eager for help (and feeling anxiety in advance of flippant advice
>from armchair permies like "get yourself some ducks mate! duck love
>mice...." etc)
>

This isn't flippant: we have both a hoophouse and an outdoor garden. Our
cat keeps rodents from damaging our veggies. She especially likes the
hoophouse, and spends a lot of her time in it. No rodent problems here.

Could you get a couple of cats?

In my (limited) experience with cats, females are considerably more
enthusiastic and better hunters than males.

Note: our cat is well fed by us. She hunts for fun and doesn't eat her
catches. We know this, and we know how much she catches, because she
invariably brings her catches home and drops them on the back porch. (She'd
rather bring them into the house, but she realizes that we will not let her
bring them in.) I've had other cats that were well fed, but nevertheless
were good hunters.

Also please note: our cat is an indoor-outdoor cat in an area that's
fairly safe for her to go outdoors. She comes in for dinner late each
afternoon (when we call her by clanging two metal food dishes together) and
stays in until morning (sleeping). This keeps her quite safe from coyotes
and she still manages to keep our place free of rodents.

She has a *very* happy life, she's a happy kitty! It's unfortunate of
course that she is killing living creatures. But that's the nature of
cats. And it is most certainly no worse than poisoning mice and voles.

Pat
--
http://www.entire-of-itself.blogspot.com/
In Pennsylvania's Northern Tier, northeastern USA.

'Be the change that you want to see in the world'
Mohandas Gandhi




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