Oreo is in da house

I feel like Wile E. Coyote.  No, wait, he never caught the roadrunner.  We caught Oreo in the Distillery District tonight (third night trying), with a Wile E. Coyote-type strategy.  You know how he'd put birdseed on the ground, and prop a box up on a stick over it?  With a string running from the stick around behind the boulder where the coyote was snickering at his clever plan, waiting to pull the string and drop the box on the roadrunner? 

That was us tonight. Okay, minus the snickering.  But the box, and the stick and the bait?  Here's our version.

Drop trap

This is a real (and pretty effective) method for catching feral cats, I swear.  The weighted PVC pipe frame and the plastic mesh overtop is our "box" the (empty) green litter bucket is our "stick" and that's our yellow cord ("string") running from the handle of the bucket.  I'm about ten feet away, within eyesight, as is Jessie, on the other side, The red square in the middle is a plastic lid with a can of wet food and a can of tuna mixed on it.  You want a lot of food on as bait, because if the wrong goes in, he can just eat his fill and wander back out and you keep waiting for the right cat.  Tonight, after Oreo watched us set this up, we only had to wait about ten minutes for him to come visit the trap.  He hadn't been fed since 6:30 the night before, so we knew he'd be hungry.

This is an important end of the trap.

Drop trap gate

 Once you drop the trap on the cat, two people run in and stand on the edges of it so the cat can't flail around and throw it off.  Then you line up a regular box trap covered with a sheet or towel to this wooden gate (with our jury rigged cardboard insert, since the real wooden piece went missing before we picked up the trap).  You take this insert out, and herd the cat toward the opening, and hopefully, he wants to go into the darker box trap to hide.  This involves herding a panicky cat under the mesh in the right direction.  It didn't take us more than a minute or so to do it, but in the process, Oreo scraped his nose on the plastic mesh.

I don't have photos of Oreo in the drop trap, because there's no time to get one.  You've got to run right in and get the cat safely in the box trap ASAP.  (Last time we used the drop trap, on one of the Boxcar cats, it took us at fifteen minutes to work the cat into the box trap.  That was a long, and exhausting struggle. 

Oreo is now in my place, his nose a little bloody. 

Poor oreo

He's been in this cage before, when he was neutered a year and a half ago.  This time he's being trapped because he has a lump in his ear to be looked at by the vet.  Then, when he's been treated, he's so social, he has a permanent home to go to with one of his lovely feeders (whose lap he'll climb into when she comes to feed him). 

That's one more cat off the street.