Pavlov's Cat

I don't think that all outside cats can be called "feral".  As Old Dog pointed out, some cat and dog owners just don't allow their animals inside the house.  Our Scamp started out to be an outside cat, he had his own cat house and everything.  Then, when he was six months old, he was seriously injured when he ran under the wheels of my hypothetical wife's car, and the vet recommended that we bring him in for awhile until he got better.  By the time he recovered, we couldn't see any reason not to let him in because he always asked to go out when he needed to.  He was injured at about the age when we should have had him fixed, but we didn't have the heart to put him through any more trauma.

When his girlfriend was about to have her kittens, Scamp started spending less time around the house. By the time the kittens had kittens, we thought he was gone for good until we spotted him one day across the street, apparently making a home in the wreckage of an old burned out barn.  On the day that the nice man from animal control took his cage back with the last kitten in it, Scamp came home a few minutes after the truck pulled out of the driveway and we had our cat back.  The animal control guy said that the mistake we had made was feeding Scamp outside, so we started feeding him in the utility room by the back door, and we never had any more visiting kitties after that.

That utility room had a laundry sink in it where I used to clean all the fish and small game that I brought home, which was a lot in those days.  Whenever I was about to clean something, Scamp would show up and beg for scraps.  It didn't matter if he was outside or inside, he always knew when I was about to clean something.  One day I was sharpening a knife for some other reason, and Scamp came running, even though I was not about to clean any game or fish.  We postulated  that it was the sound of my touching up the knife with a butcher's steel that he had come to associate with those tasty snacks.  I tried a few dry runs, which tended to confirm our hypothesis.  After that, one of Scamp' nicknames became "Pavlov's Cat".

All the dogs we had over the years were outside dogs.  They had sturdy dog houses with dry bedding that I changed regularly, and a large pen to run around in.  Chaining a dog up to his house will tend to make him crazy unless you let him off and interact with him every day, which I didn't have time to do in those days.  Our last dog Splash never was tied up or leashed in his life.  I would let him out of his pen once a day for an hour or so on days that we weren't going hunting.  If he wasn't back when I wanted to close the gate, all I had to do was bay like a beagle to bring him in.  And that's how Talks With Beagles got his name.

If you are an enrolled member of a political party, you can go to meetings and vote on stuff, and you might get yourself elected as a delegate to their state or national convention.  Many members, however, aren't interested in going to meetings or conventions, they just want to contribute to the cause.  I went to one meeting and one state convention with the Republicans, but there were no Libertarian meetings within a hundred miles of Cheboygan.  I suppose I could have started a local chapter, but I thought I needed more than one member for that.