Starting A Cat Shelter

"meowme" wrote in message
...
Hello,
I am to be semi retired soon,and I have planned this for years.
I am buying a small house on about 1/3 acrre.
First I have 3 indoor cats and the shelter must be outside.
I want to adopt about 5-7 older cats that nobody wants and give them a
nice
home for there golden years.
The house is very rural with lots of wild critters around,.raccons
,possums,snakes, etc.in North Florida.
I want to fence in an area of the back yard,to keep the critters out and
the cats in.
If I lay acouple of feet of chicken wire along the ground flush to the
fence,Do You think that might prevent the burrowing critters from getting
in and old cats from getting out?
Also if I dig a 6 by 6 shallow dithch fill it with sand will kitties use
it
as a litter box?
Also I must build somekind of shelter where the cats can stay warm.it gets
quite cold in North Florid,in the winter at night.Will the cats shelter in
one place together for warmth?
Any suggestions or different ideas would be apreciated..
Thanks Bob

My guess would be the sand would get pretty nasty pretty quick and they'll
use the grass. The big challenge is keeping the cats from climbing over the
fence. Some claim that if the fence turns horizontally a couple of feet in
to the cat run at the top that the cats can't climb out. My shelter tried
this and it seemed to work on the tame cats until the ferals climbed out and
the tame cats followed. Now all of our cat runs are covered with a roof of 1
x 1 plastic mesh supported on 1/2" metal electrical tube bent into hoops.
Our runs are a max of 20 feet wide which takes three - 10 foot lengths of
the tube to span.

We have a 10' x 14' storage building in each cat run but no heat. They all
pile up in the winter and keep each other warm. They get real hot in the
summer though so we're adding roof vents before next summer.

we haven't had any problems with the cats digging out or anything else
digging in. Our bunny hutch is a different story; they've already torn up
the chicken wire we "floored" the enclosure with so now we're going to lay a
foot or 2 of large gravel all around the edge so they can't go right up to
the fence and dig.
GOOD LUCK
Ron