Cat lovers! What's a good way to keep feral cats warm during the Winter?
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at
3:56 am
Any answers from abusive, sadistic jerks who hate cats, will be reported to Yahoo immediately!
Filed under: Cat Behavior
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If you have a barn or a shed I like to stack square bails so that there is a hole in leading into the covered middle. Open a haybail so there is loose hay inside for them to cuddle in. My outside cats always loved that and I think the hay is perfect insolation and fairly inexpensive. You can do the same thing outside under a eve or cover the top of the hay with a tarp to keep the bails dry.
I have a few of the medium Dogloo houses with doors on them. There are two that are full of straw, and one that has food and a no-freeze water bowl inside. This keeps them warm and fed if they are out. They have access to our garage, but if the cat door freezes on it, or it is too busy and they don’t want to come around….they have shelter and food.
I have three ferals that "came" with our house.
Build a shelter for the cats. Do a search on "feral cat shelters".
Here are links to 2:
http://www.feralcat.com/shelter.html
http://indyferal.org/index.php?page=shelters
Torbay and Joe have excellent answers for you. The dog loos are heavy and well insulated. Straw is an excellent insulator too and that should be at the bottom of the shelter with some soft bedding on top.
I found a cat mat that supposedly has an insulating layer inside that reflects the cat’s body heat back to its body. It was about $20 and is washable. Apparently the microwavable mats don’t work too well – the information said they would retain heat for twelve hours and in another place said it was only two to three hours so I passed on those.
I think warmed plastic bottles of water might add some heat to the shelter and I don’t know how long they would retain heat. Water loses heat very fast.