Hi Paul
Some cats are remarkably persistent about getting into boxes. I have a couple which visit here. It’s difficult to understand how they can get in through such tiny entrances and then twist themselves round double backed corridors and still get to the food.
My current set up, however, seems to be working. I have a perspex type sheet on top of flower pots filled with soil, just over hog height, but uncomfortably low for a cat to go far – this is a few inches from the entrance to the hog box, so there’s not room for the cat to get between the perspex and the box. A table over the top has legs blocking the sides between the box and the perspex. One cat did try to limbo dance under the perspex once, but looked thoroughly uncomfortable and seems to have given up. But even if one got that far, I don’t think they would be able to get into the door of the hog box – and haven’t so far. This set up can easily be moved out of the way during the day.
I usually put some food under the perspex (for hogs that prefer to eat out of doors) and more in the hog box.
It might work if you put a heavy obstacle right outside and the opposite side to the corridor (if it goes immediately one way or the other). I have noticed that the cats tend to enter at an angle in these circumstances and the obstacle would prevent them from getting into the right position.
Personally, I think it’s unlikely that the marks on the hogs are natural, but may be wrong. If they are natural discolouration of the spines, I imagine they would grow again like that, similar to fur, but again, not certain about that. But I find that patches of differently coloured spines are normally only a very few spines and here they have always been paler rather than darker.
The best way is to look out for other features of the hog, such as facial marks (stars, as in horse, cheetah type ‘tear drop’ type marks, etc.) whether skirt is darker than spines, has bars of different colours down it. Spines dark or pale in relation to other hogs, etc. Actually, when you start looking closely, there are loads of differences even down to colour or skin patterning on the hind legs as they disappear. I was able to identify more than 12 different hogs (plus hoglets) by that method for a few years, when I was studying them more closely. Of course other people marking the hogs makes it more difficult, because a pale faced hog might turn up with a dark face, etc., but there are often different features which indicate which hog it is.
With hoglets they tend to change markings a bit as they grow so I usually had to re-assess them once they were adults re. markings.
