194 posts tagged “cats”

Here's a cat with a problem:

Her name is Josephine, she's a sweet six-month old feral who was trapped for spaying and now turns out to be tame.  She loves to have her head patted and rolls around on the floor of the recovery cage in bliss when you do it.  I even had her in my lap for a few pats this morning.  Her problem?  Once again, there's no foster space and she may have to go back out on the street.  In a neighborhood where the kids are mean to the cats, and even threw glass at the cat trapper.

Here's a problem caused by a cat.

 

This carpet damage was done by Macaroon, who can shred this much in mere moments.  The top example is in front of the sliding door to my bedroom, where Sodapop was eating crunchies (Macaroon had finished hers) and she wanted in there.  The bottom damage was done outside my bathroom, where Chester stayed with me temporarily.  (Through a minor oversight, I had all but those two inches of the threshold barricaded, because I know she's capable of this.)   I live in a rental place.  These bits of damage are in opposite ends of the fully-broadloomed apartment.  Help!  Is there anyway to fix this kind of thing without me having to pay the landlord for all new carpeting when I move out?  Do any of my home-handy Vox neighbors have a suggestion?

Her name is Cole.  She's adolescent kitten sized, but she's 2 or 3 years old.  Look at that face!

She came to me (trapped by another trapper) a couple of nights ago.  She was spayed about a week ago and has turned out to be well on her way to socialization.  She lies in my lap and PURRS REAL LOUD.  She loves to be patted and squirms this way and that to enjoy it more.  She LOOOVES head rubs.  She is too sweet to be put back out to her colony, where apparently, kids in the neighborhood are mean to the cats.

When she came to me from another trapper to finish up her recovery, there was no foster space for her.  It was killing her trapper to contemplate putting her back out on the street.  Today, though, a spot has opened up.  Yay!

I just had to share her picture with you.

Chester, trapped three weeks ago, left my bathroom tonight for his feeder's house, where he'll spend the next week before he flies off to his new owner (the feeder's sister) in Nova Scotia. 

Here he was before, back in his feral colony, either stray or abandoned:

Here he was, this morning, looking the epitome of the happy, placid, fond-of-human-attention housecat.  Which he totally is.

Good luck and happy travels, Chester! 

(The cat bed went with him, since he liked it so much.)

Here at my writing retreat, the retreat center has a resident cat, CJ.

CJ's been here at Gibraltar Point since before I started coming out eight years ago.  The last few years, we'd seen not so much of him because there was another cat, Slate, a dark tabby, who hogged all the attention.  Also, CJ's favorite buddy was a musician who was here at the centre (a converted school) long-term, who stayed in one of the portable classrooms out back that had been converted to a music studio.  Slate died in the spring, and maybe the musician's gone, because this summer, CJ is showing up multiple times a day.  He goes "Yaowww!" outside the windows of the communal kitchen when he wants in, because he knows that's where someone can usually be found, and "Yaowww!" very loudly in the corridors where his voice really carries, especially at 3 a.m., when he wants someone to let him back out.  If you show up, you get to pet him, then he leads you to one of the doors to outside.

Speaking of doors, I locked myself out of my room at 11 p.m. last night.  In my tiredness, I walked out of the room, pushing the button to lock the door, and grabbed my memory stick instead of my room keys as I left for the kitchen.  Yes, I get the irony of taking my "memory" "key" with me.  The retreat staff are home over the water in the city on the weekend, but someone turned up a master key after we determined that we couldn't get in through my window, and I was getting resigned to the idea of sleeping in the lounge.

This morning, another of our group got locked out of his room.  Hardware, not wetware problem that time.  Something about a malfunctioning doorknob.  I think it's fixed now.  Two days in and two lockouts.  This could become a round robin all week. 

 

Oreo got checked out at the vet today and the lump/bump/abcess/whatever in his ear that had caused him to need vet attention (which wasn't visible as we trapped him last night) appears to have been scratched and dispersed whatever fluid it had in it. He didn't need any meds, or any treatment beyond his updated vaccinations.

The upshot?  No return to my place, and his new owner, Vanessa was able to picked him up at the vet and take him straight to his new home tonight.  Godspeed, Oreo.  You inhabited two feral colonies (that we know of), probably sired some kittens (I'm thinking of one litter with three tuxedo cats at the boxcars in particular) and won over the hearts of at least five feeders, a security guard or two and countless passers-by in the Distillery District (everyone knew "that black and white cat" over there). 

Here he is at the boxcars:

 

And in the Distillery District, in his heavy winter floof:

 

Have fun in your new home with your new feline friends, little guy.

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.

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.

 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. 

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. 

They got to it six months after they originally said they would, but the city's development agency finally razed the Boxcar Colony site.  Here's the before (when I was feeding them from 2006 up till relocation in the fall of 2008 -- and remember, my trapping partner Joyce fed them here for NINE years):

Winter view:

At the side of the boxcars, flowers like this grew:

And here's the After, photos I took today.  Same tree:

And here's the view looking straight in from the street at the side, toward where the tulips and lilacs were:

This is a pile of the railroad ties that were under the boxcars.  I once crawled in underneath, along the ties, to retrieve a cat's body so it wouldn't dceompose next to a feeding area.

It makes me sad to look at this, although all logic says it shouldn't.  It always made me kind of sad before that the cats were there in the first place, among barbed wire, rusted railcar undercarriages, and dirty water runoff from the restaurant pipes, with their water bowls freezing over in the winter.  Now they're all in homes, or at the horse farm.  And this area hasn't been demolished to put in yet another condo tower (for once), this is actually going to be recreated as a park (that's why the tree is still standing).  So that's good, right? 

Instead of feeling melancholy, I should feel very pleased and proud, because I personally started up the plan for management of this colony in the first place, and then, for the relocation, so that the scene above didn't happen with cats still on the property, getting scattered as their unusual home was destroyed.

Maybe someday I'll write a book about those two years I got to know the Boxcar colony.

 

Jackie-cat spent two weeks recuperating from her surgery in my place.  She did great.  Ate her pills in their pill pockets like the treats they were, and was very sweet.  When I petted her in the recovery cage, she purred and rubbed her head on the bars of the cage, and rolled back and forth in bliss.  Last night, I left the cage door open, and she took the opportunity to have an explore around the place.  This was a good test of her sociability.  She didn't bolt or hide, just wandered about checking the place out.  Tumbleweed and Macaroon each had a hiss at her, but she wasn't much fazed.  She went back to the cage, her safe place (very briefly), any time she got nervous, then came right back out.  After about 20 minutes of easy exploring, with little visits back to the, she went back into her cage for a few minutes, kneaded her towel
and purred.

Here's a photo of Sodapop checking out her digs right about then, and through that I was sitting four feet away and could hear her purring and she was still kneading her towel.  She loooooves Sodapop.

 My two cats who hissed at her kept their distance as she came back out again to check out more of the place, but but she's wasn't afraid to walk near them.  Jackie's going to be great as a housecat.

Today, she went to the vet again to have the sutures from her eye surgery removed.  And I handed her off to feral cat feeder Jennie, who will be her temporary foster home for the next month.  She's too tame to go back to the street.

On the way home from the vet, I walked past the place where Jackie and her former colony used to feed till last fall.  The people who worked at this office fed them outside and inside their front door.  This is what's at the front door now.

Yes, the sign on the vacant office (put there by the property owner who never liked the idea of the previous occupants taking care of the colony) says DO NOT FEED THE CATS.  And yes, that's a cat dish on the ground at the right. 

Been having too much fun to post since Wednesday, I guess.  Here's a photo from one of mine and Cappy's adventures from earlier in the week -- taking Jackie the cat to the vet for her post-surgical checkup.  She was as good as any of my cats (and better than some) with the exception of a huge stress pee on the weigh scale right after I took her out of her carrier.  She hid behind the fan on the counter while we were waiting for the vet, but then let me cuddle her and hold her for all the pokey-proddy stuff. 

She's been very sweet and loves to be petted.  She purrs when petted in the cage, and rolls around and rubs her cheeks up against the bars, etc.  She did have another big stress pee when I wrapped a towel around her and brought her into the living room to sit with us on the couch one evening, so there's still some socialization to do.  The red couch of fabulousness missed the hit, luckily, and all the pee went down my shirt and leg and into my slipper. 

Thursday was my first ever baseball game, with tickets from a lawyer my office uses for great seats to watch the Reds beat the Jays.  Here was our vantage point:

Row 18 behind home plate. 

And look, they opened the dome!  Here it is, in progress.

 

I had a lot of fun.  What cracked me up were the 10-year olds behind us who trash-talked every player on both teams like it was their paid job.  But they also had encyclopedic baseball knowledge, just like I imagine Cappy did at that age. Cappy was still working the strategy around the sacrifice bunt when I heard the one kid behind us explaining it to his friend.  Anyway, I had a blast and I'm all ready to do it again today as Cappy treats me to Phillies vs. Jays.  He's in his Phillies cap (and yes, he does know how to wear it properly, M------l and cranky), and he's going to get me a retro Jays cap.  Yes, there will be pictures.

I'm out of time to continue this post, since it's nearly time to leave for the game.  Catch you later, after the Jays beat the Phillies yet again.  

I dropped Jackie the feral cat off at the vet on Monday to have her ruptured abcess cleaned up.  Apparently she was so sweet and docile at the vets' that they didn't even need to sedate her to clean it up.

But while she was there, they discovered that her blind eye (blind since she was a kitten--she's now 5 or 6) was ulcerated and under a lot of pressure and swollen to the point that her eyelids didn't properly cover it.  So it needed to be removed.  She had her surgery yesterday and will be coming back to my place tonight for 2-3 weeks recovery. 

But best of all, she's proven to be social enough, and the vet so taken with her, that they don't want her to go back out onto the street.  They're looking for a place that will foster her after recovery, and if one isn't found by the end of the three weeks, Jennie, one of the Distillery District feeders, has a temporary indoor place lined up for her.  The vet clinic might even foster her in the clinic, where they often have foster kittens and cats about the place, and people adopt them right out of there. 

I forgot to mention in the previous post, that when Jackie was with her previous colony, a short distance away from the Distillery District, the colony caretakers had a report that she had been hit by a car in 2007 and assumed she was dead.  She reappeared in December 2007, perfectly fine.  So she's had quite a story so far, and now it looks like a happily ever after, too.