My Cat Fence

I had a mischievous cat named Ramesses. He featured in an earlier blog of mine. I said that I should have known he was going to be a bad cat. When my vet asked me if I wanted a kitten, I said no, but the vet had other ideas. He brought me a cardboard box with a reddish orange kitten in the bottom. As the kitten stumbled around the box, I knew I could not refuse. So Ramesses came home with me. He played and played, never growing tired. Eventually, I had to get some sleep before going to work. The day dawned, and I called for Ramesses. He didn’t come. Wondering where he was, I took the garbage bag from the kitchen, dumped it in the can outside, and hauled the can to the street for the garbage man. When the garbage truck came down the street, I thought, “He crawled inside the garbage bag!” The garbage man assumed his gentlest manner and said that a kitten could not have survived the crushing motion of the truck’s mechanism. I felt horrible. As I stepped into the bedroom to make sure I had turned off the light, I thought I saw something. It was between the nightstand and the wall and was sticking out from under the nightstand. It was the tip of a tiny orange tail. When I jerked away the nightstand, there he was, sound asleep! I was overjoyed … and mad! I picked him up, and he purred.

Right then and there, I should have known he was going to be a bad cat. One of Ramesses’ favorite games was smash. Around two or three in the morning, a crash somewhere on the first floor of my house would knock me awake, and I would sit bolt upright in bed with every nerve straining to hear the burglar’s footsteps. Then I would find that I had left a drinking glass on the kitchen counter and that Ramesses had knocked it off, smashing it across the tile floor. I soon learned to store all glass items behind cabinet doors, but, every now and then, I would forget a glass or a bowl. That night, Ramesses would play smash again. But you had to love him! Whenever I took a bath, he begged to be lifted up and dropped into the water, where he swam gleefully. I trained him to walk on a leash, and he and I took many trips to a nature center where we hit the trails. He especially liked the pier beside the goldfish pond.

Later in Ramesses’ life, I had moved to the country, and I had a fenced yard just the right size for a cat. Ramesses spent hours of unsupervised play time in the grass surrounded by the wire fence. One day, I peered through a window at the right moment to see him scaling the fence. One paw after the other, he slowly made his way to the top. Then he gleefully sprang to total freedom beyond the enclosure. Naturally, I dashed outside, scooped him up, and returned him to the house.

Now what? I wanted him to continue to enjoy the outdoors, but he could not be trusted to remain within the fence. Suddenly, a solution came to mind.

I visited the hardware store and purchased several large angle brackets, a handful of bolts, and a roll of fence wire. Back home, I cut the new fence wire to half its height. Next, I bolted the angle brackets to the tops of the metal fence posts. Finally, I wired the half-length fence to the angle brackets.

My Inexpensive Idea for a Cat Fence

I coaxed Ramesses into the yard, and I returned to the house to watch through the window. He went to the corner where he liked to scale the fence, and, like a slow-motion acrobat, he gradually made his way to the top. There, he found more wire fence bending over his head! As he could not hang upside-down from it so as to go up and over it, he was stuck.

The Cat Fence in Winter

For a minute, I felt sorry for Ramesses. He had gone to such trouble to learn to scale a fence and now he was trapped. When I remembered the smashed tumblers, the shredded wallpaper, and the many other insurrections that he had caused, I soon recovered from feeling too sympathetic.