Noisy Coyotes, hungry opossums

My dogs insist on barking at the coyotes, which makes sense as the coyotes insist on wandering across the lawn in the middle of the night. It makes for a difficult conundrum, though, in which I get to lie in bed wondering at which point I should go outside to make sure everything is okay and it's just a vocal debate between two cousins of the canine world. Fortunately there has been no yelping, which would imply escalation and the possible involvement of teeth.

The cats deal very differently with their interloper, who is a fat opossum that has discovered the open buffet that is the cat food dishes. The cats sit in their warm little beds on the countertop--this is out in a shed with a spare room we call the pussycat lounge--and glare at the opossum. As far as I can tell no actual agitation occurs. The cats would be glaring at each other if there wasn't an opossum, so the total effect seems to be nil. The only problem is that unlike the cats, the opossum is not litter trained, so on the whole we prefer he doesn't visit and close the door most of the time.

Open buffet cat food dishes deserve a little explanation. House cats generally overeat when they have 24/7 access to food, if only because they are bored. But it's the same as having, say, an open box of honey nut cheerios open on the counter in the kitchen. You might not be bored, exactly, but your stomach forgets that you ate a cup of cheerios only an hour before, and they are so tasty that it's hard not to gravitate toward them. And they crunch!

Overeating cats leads to fat cats, of course, and fat cats are prone to diabetes and kidney failure. All cats are prone to kidney failure as they get older, but extra fat doesn't help.

But my cats have 24/7 access to food. What gives? This could be bad, for goodness sakes. However, these are outdoor cats. They like the taste of freshly killed mice--and cardinals--and dry food is something you eat every couple of days when you have temporarily exhausted the supply of mice that run into your paws (we have somewhat lazy cats. In their defense, we also have a ton of mice with mediocre survival instincts).  They also are outside in the cold all the time, except for when they finagle a seat in the kitchen, which is every day when it's cold out.

Also, in an effort to get them into shape for winter, they get a can of cat food to share every day. They like this even better than cardinals, and so they hardly eat any of their dry food at all. The opossum is quite happy, though I'm sure he wishes he was in on the canned food too.