I grew up on a working farm in southeastern Indiana, and running around on its nearly 200 acres were two kinds of cats: house cats and barn cats. (There might’ve been three if you believed old Doc Wiel, the veterinarian who lived at the tail of the dead-end road. He claimed a mountain lion had leapt across the lane right in front of his truck near our house. He was probably right, as our farm was surrounded by fields and woodlots and thickets – perfect for hiding a big cat.) Certainly our farm, with its house and multitude of wood and metal outbuildings, was good habitat for felines. Like my brothers and me, the house cats lived at least part of their lives in our house, but this step up the cat evolution ladder had taken years.

When I was young, we had a new home built behind our old one and then we watched a bulldozer knock down our old house. I loved bulldozers and this was one of the coolest things I had seen one do. The new house had more rules, mostly set and enforced by my dad, and one was simply, no cats in the house. At any time. Then, after a year or two, a particularly beautiful and disarming barn cat named BDBDB charmed his way into daytime house visits. He came in, wide-eyed and amazed at all the technology, drank some milk from a bowl and then got escorted back outside, purring all the while. BDBDB was mostly blind and borderline retarded but he was a trendsetter. Eventually a few lucky cats could stay in the house all day and all night, year-round. It was like Orwell’s Animal Farm: the rules kept changing. For the animals in that story, one of their laws states: “No animal shall sleep in a bed.” Later the pigs alter the rule: “No animal shall sleep in a bed except for the pigs.” The house cats were the pigs on our farm.

But the barn cats abided by dictums as rigid and abiding as the barn itself, built in 1883 and constructed with wood pegs instead of nails or bolts. Their rules, had they been painted on the barnside, would have read: The Barn Cats Live and Die in the Barn. Like the wise creatures in Orwell’s story, the barn cats knew it was bullshit but they were too honorable to play the dirty pig game. House cats grew fat and sassy, sleeping on the carpet and eating canned food; barn cats were expected to keep the mice under control.

We knew the origins of some of the barn cats. We knew their mothers. We could say, “Well, Bear had four kittens, and now they all live in the barn. Their names are Patches, Dumbo, Snowball, and Champagne.” (Our mother had once called a kitten “champagne-colored,” so any kitten born that color got named similarly. My brothers and I were in single digits at the time, and friends must have wondered about our home lives when we introduced them to the adorable little furballs Beer and Whiskey.)

But other cats just appeared on our farm. I am not referring to the miracle of life. No, some of these cats came full-sized. In the evening we’d go out to feed the cows and the barn cats and new cats would be walking around, meowing for the food, pretending like they knew the routines. Sometimes they were healthy – cute, even. Other times they were sick, with mucus dripping from their noses and goopy eyes.

“What the heck!” we’d say. “Where did you come from?”

The mystery was solved to an extent when my mom taught one particular boy in her first-grade classroom. She was talking about the cats on our farm. I am not sure exactly what she was explaining – maybe something about social classes. This little boy raised his hand.

“I know what to do with extra cats,” he said.

“What?” my mom asked, fearing the worst.

“You take them to this house. They like cats. This house is out on Old Milan Road, and you know you are there when you see a big red barn, and you go out there at night and you throw the cats out and they run into the barn….”

He was describing our place.

The house cats got regular shots and went to the vet’s office as needed. When a house cat, Kali, dislocated her hips during pregnancy, Mom took her to have a C-section. House cats got pregnant after visiting the barn – a trip to the wrong side of the farm they couldn’t resist taking several times a year. That, or the big ugly tomcats with scarred heads and torn ears skulked around the house, slinking under the bushes and waiting for the house cats to come outside. Mom would talk about a cat “feeling the heat” and sometimes this happened even in early spring. (This is how I learned about the odd, if brief, pairings of sex.) The house cats had kittens and months later returned to the house, without the kittens. (It’s true: an upper-middle class house cat can give birth to kittens that are all barn cat class.)

If a cow stepped on a barn cat, and this happened, since the cows lived in the barn in the winter, only the cat’s name changed. Skippy became Skippy NoTail, or maybe TC would become TC Threelegs. These incidents never surprised us, but you never knew what to expect. You could swing open the barn door, the squeak of the hinge calling the cats out from under the mangers and down from the hayloft, and something would be different. You would then go back to the house and report it.

“Minx’s tail now hangs straight down,” or “Billy can only walk in a circle,” you might say.

The last cat I called my own was Jitsu, and he stayed with me for twelve years. He was barn-born, one of a litter from our best mama cat, Patches. I quickly claimed Jitsu, because I liked his markings of orange on his white fur, and the goatee of orange around his mouth. I named him after a He-Man action figure my younger brother had. Jitsu came to the house. He won the cat lottery.

Jitsu had a sister in that litter with similar markings. We named her Sika. I don’t know why. (We constantly had to come up with new names, and we often had to dig deep. We named a cat The Missing Link once.) If Jitsu won the cat lottery, Sika did more than just not win it. Somehow she lost it.

Sika was born small, and living in the barn shrunk her. The contrast became something we all watched: a science experiment in the middle of summer. A cat in the house, eating canned food and getting a vet’s care, versus a barn cat of the same lineage. Who would get bigger, or be healthier? It was like one of those science experiments that scarcely held any wonder. Like, which cup of dirt and grass seed will grow better: the one in the sun on the windowsill, or the one in the dark closet? If you thought about it at all, you pretty much knew what was coming.

But, to be fair to the control group, Sika was hardly a normal cat. Like a cartoon action figure herself, Sika had a secret power: the sonic sneeze. When she sneezed, a rope of snot would shoot out and wrap around something. Walking by Sika was risky, because she might toss a snot rope at you and tangle your legs together. This made us less inclined to give Sika the love she needed.

We never conducted scientific measurements, but Jitsu soon weighed over ten pounds. Sika’s head eventually became full-sized, but her body never grew. I bet she never weighed more than a pound. She lived for years, though.

We observed other feline scientific oddities on our farm. Once, my uncle, who lived on the farm bordering ours, was standing with my dad in our barn, looking at the cows. It was winter, and the snow blew through little cracks in the walls and sifted into tiny piles. The cows would come in from the lot with layers of snow on their backs, and clumps of ice on their eyelashes.

While my dad and uncle stood there, a cat wandered over and sat, staring at them. The cat seemed all right, but its extremities must’ve gotten frostbitten. Because when it suddenly coughed, part of its ear flew off.

On one of my recent trips down there, my mom and I went to the barn to feed the cats. They have fewer barn cats now, but the ones out there have similar maladies. Mom opened the door and about twenty cats came running. She poured dry food into a pan and they gathered to eat. One cat was a cyclops. Another examined us with eyes set so far apart on its head it looked like it had been inbred into another species altogether.

Mom carried a glass of milk she was taking to feed a mother cat and her kittens in a different shed.

“This is my goal,” she said. “To make the lives better for the barn cats.”

She is retired now, and has time for more goals.

I looked at the swirling mass of cats. Some of them did seem healthier. But then I spotted one with half a tail, clumps of excrement in its fur on the tail it did have.

“Mom,” I said, “Dad’s gonna have to cut that one’s tail off. It’s broken.”

“Well, before, when the cows were in here, they would lick it off. Now the cows are in the pasture, and it kinda builds up,” she said.

“Ooooof,” I said. “But I’m serious. Flies will lay eggs on its tail. Then it’ll get maggots.”

“It’ll be okay,” Mom said. “What can I do, anyway?”

These days, my wife and I have two dogs. They live in the house, even at night, and get treated like children. We spend thousands of dollars on their care. I have forgotten, almost, what it is like to be responsible for over seventy living, breathing animals.

Indianapolis is surrounded by pet superstores. I know of maybe ten pet stores that are bigger than the grocery store in my hometown. When I go in one of these superstores, I go straight to the cardboard box display, as big as a kitchen stove, filled to the brim with pig ears. It has become fashionable to take the severed ears of pigs from slaughterhouses and dry them and add a little barbeque flavor. These make chewy treats dogs love. Some of the ears have tattoo markings that were used to identify the pig back when it was alive. There are also displays of pig joints, where you can pick up a knee joint or a leg bone, maybe an esophagus, for your dog to gnaw. (Orwell’s pigs wouldn’t have raised dogs if they’d seen this coming.)

This seems to me like a good use of what would be a wasted part of the process of eating pork. I am always a little surprised, though, to see the different kinds of people pawing through the box of pigs’ ears. Little kids. Old men. Clean women in fancy clothes. It doesn’t appear to bother anyone, although it seems like it would. We don’t like to be reminded of slaughterhouses.

Picking out the biggest pig ears always reminds me of home, where I was a little closer to the process of killing. Although we never raised hogs, the pig ears remind me of the barn. I often think of our barn cats, and feel sorry for the way some of them have to live. I am sorry that some of them have to heal themselves or die. I might also feel a little anger toward the kid who told my mom he knew of a good spot to drop off unwanted cats. I will feel outrage toward the people like him who are raised to think it is acceptable to drop animals in the country, where inevitably someone else has to take care of them and feel guilty about their fates.

But then I think of the little boys waiting at our home: the little benji-type mutt mix and the Labrador, and I think of how excited they will be to see me carry this plunder into the house. They will come running from where they’ve been napping and they will jump and whine and sniff the plastic bag. They’ll be as toasty and warm as cookies and they’ll sit and thump their tails on the floor, pleading with their eyes. Drool will spill from their mouths at the thought of biting into the cartilage of the dead pig. They are as spoiled as animals can be.

Still, the pig ears remind me of life out in the barn on my parents’ farm, where the barn cats live and die; where animals are still animals and it is not always possible to care for all the sick and wounded wandering through this world.