This message is from: "Linda Lehnert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> With all of the postings lately about different breeds of dogs, which I usually refer to as sh...ers because they are messy, I must defend and promote that indispensible, absolute necessity for every barn - a rodent control engineer aka the Barn Cat. Without a good barn cat or two or three, your barn will be overrun with undesirable immigrants aka rats and mice that get into your grain and hay and eat it and worse. They are harbingers of diseases, i.e. leptospirosis and periodic ophthalmia (we lost a gorgeous line-bred Ben Don Morgan gelding years ago due to that) and other dread diseases. In short they are just plain dirty. Barn cats just love Fjords, Morgans and other breeds too. They are clean and quiet. If you find a particularly friendly kitten (unspayed female barn cats tend to take up with itinerant farm cats and grow their own replacements), you can bring him or her into the house and convert him/her to a housecat. Klein Max the German farm tiger began life as a barn kitten - his mother was a pretty, friendly gray striped barn cat and his father was an itinerant farm tiger. So, here's to that must have for every barn - the Barn Cat. We had several dogs over the years, not by my choice. The best with horses was our Schaeferhund (German shepherd). The two worst were the Irish Sh...er (extremely hyper, stupid, chased horses, got kicked and continued to chase horses and get kicked again - she never learned) and the Belgian Shepherd Malinois (hyper, noisy and would run up behind the horse and try to bite the horse's hind legs - we gave her to the animal shelter, someone adopted her, trained her to be a police dog and she ended up with the Guadalajara, Mexico police force - go figure). Linda in Alanya for 3 more weeks, then it's off to Germany ein mehr Mal
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