THIS KITTEN IS A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT

At my parents' house, we've picked up a wild stray kitten.

But the kitten is a liberal Democrat.

I put a little food half-way down the driveway.  But the cat is still begging for food at our front door.  If the cat would just go out and look, there is food sitting out there half-way to the street.  But instead the cat is meowing insistently at our front door.

If it wasn't so busy begging at the door, and went out hunting, it would find the food 

It's a very small kitten.  And it's already had enough to eat today.  Earlier in the day, I already fed the cat more than enough for one day for one kitten.  Yet the cat is still neowing insistently at the door begging for more.  Then it was meowing at the back door.  And at the neighbor's door.  And then again at our back door.  

The island has wild cats.  The feral (wild) cats have kittens. 

So this kitten at our door has never been domesticated.  It lives in the wild.  It has never lived in a house nor been fed by a family.

Yet somehow it knows to come begging at the door of a house?  It instictively knows to beg.  This cat is a liberal Democrat.

Thousands of years before cats started to live as house pets, cats were living in the wild.  They can find their own food.   But this one was born to beg.

In fact some people here want to get rid of the feral cats because they eat the "curly tail" lizards that are a symbol of island life here.  And they also catch and kill the wild parrots (occasionally).  So there is a war between the defenders of the wild cats and the defenders of the parrots and curly tails.

Now a cat's natural food in nature wouldn't appeal to me.  But for thousands of years little cats have been eating things that don't sound so great to humans but are appropriate for them:  Bugs, lizards, mice, birds, etc.

Yet I felt bad after the hurricane blew through.  Still, I didn't want the cat to get in the habit of coming to our door and expect to get fed every day.  So I put some food down the driveway toward the road, away from the house.  I was hoping to slowly get the cat looking farther and farther away from the house until the scraps were out on the road.

If it found some food after searching for it, it would develop the habits to survive.  It wouldn't know who put the food out there.  So it would learn to search instead of begging -- but the search would be rigged with something to find.  

Instead, the cat just sits there on the doorstep meowing. There's food out there.  I put it there.  It is not very far at all.  And it's really, really obvious.  It's next to a tuna fish can with fresh water in it that used to be at the door.  There's nothing else around on the gravel driveway.  But the cat is so busy begging it doesn't see it.

This also makes me think about how God looks at us.   God has placed what we need all around us.  But we can't find it because we're not looking.  Or maybe looking in all the wrong places.  God probably has his hand on His forehead, so to speak, amazed that we haven't found what He has provided.  It's not hard to find.  It's our attitude that is the problem.  If this cat were not so determined to beg, it would take about 3 minutes to find the food.

Most of all I want the cat to learn how to fend for itself.  It's a wild cat.  There is plenty out there to eat.  So the kitten needs to learn how to live off the land.  After all, we're not always here staying at this house.  So if the cat becomes dependent on hand-outs at our door, it won't have anything to eat when we're not here.