122 posts tagged “feral cats”

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. 

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.

That's it, we're done.  There's no more boxcar colony.  The boxcars are still there (for the time being), but the cats have moved out.

It took two years of trapping to work our way through sterilizing all the cats and rescuing all the kittens for adoption.  We hit the done point, where the colony could live the rest of its natural life, without continually contributing to the overpopulation problem.  Then we got the news the site would be razed for waterfront development.  We found in May that we had till the end of October to trap all the cats still there again, and find places to re-home them to.

Last night, we got the last cat.  One week before the end of October.  The area all around there will start changing soon.

Lincoln was a challenge.  He was the most recent arrival to this colony and we had him trapped within a week of that late this spring when we were just interested in getting him fixed, so he was the wariest around any trap this round.  Probably remembered his alien abduction experience too well.  Friendly, though, and he would come to Joyce, who's been the godsend for this colony, our Cat Whisperer who has fed this colony for almost ten years now.  The cats know her and trust her.

Lincoln, for his short stay there, does, too.  We think he probably had human owners at some point, because Joyce could pat him, as I've posted before.  And this was the key to getting him, since he had the whole trap-savvy thing going on.

So here's how it went down last night.

Joyce, Sara and I load up at 8 p.m., an hour and a half later than the night before, when it took Mr. Lincoln forever to show his face.  It's hard enough trapping a black cat at night in the shadows of the feeding area when you're not even sure if he's there.

We decided to try my strategy of Joyce crouching by and luring him to the open carrier with mmmmm, roast beef gravy inside it for bait.   If he went even halfway in, Joyce would have been able to boost his butt in and slam the door shut.   Sara and I had to stand well back, beyond the hillock, beside the car, so as not to make Lincoln nervous.  We couldn't see anything that was going on, just a piece of the back of Joyce's jacket.

That didn't work.  So Joyce had a different strategy.  She would stand the carrier up on its end so the open door was on top, and then crouch down and lure him to her.  Then, she would pick him up and drop him down vertically into the carrier.  She said she'd practiced it that afternoon with her own cats at home.  And got scratched for her trouble.  Yikes, I thought.  If one of her own cats scratched her, Lincoln will be way worse.  I also pictured Lincoln splaying his feet out against all four sides of the carrier opening, refusing to be pushed in.  Then he'd get loose and run off and we wouldn't be able to get him for days more. 

Again, Sara and I had to stand way back, so couldn't help. After conferring with Joyce, I walked back to the car with Sara and flat out told her it wouldn't work.  About two minutes later, Joyce the Cat Whisperer proved me totally wrong.

We still couldn't see what was happening, but we saw some kind of quick movement, then heard the door shut.  "Did she do it?!" we asked each other.  "I think she did it!"  Then Joyce called out,  "I've got him!" 

We ran over, absolutely thrilled and I'm all "Holy shit!" and we're all nine kinds of happy, and close the latches on the carrier and before anybody could move, I said "I have to get my camera!"  I wouldn't even let them put the carrier back down the right way till I got a picture of the last capture.

This is looking down on him through the carrier door.  He closed his eyes against the flash.  That brown in the back is not cat diarrhea, it's the remains of the roast beef gravy, which he was sitting it at that point.  Unlike Pretty Girl getting muddy during her capture in the drop trap, Lincoln's fur would at least be tasty when he eventually cleaned himself off.

Time from start of trapping to Lincoln in the box?  Less than half an hour.  Maybe even 20 minutes.  How did she do it?  Joyce took hold of the scruff of his neck, lifted him up, stuck her other hand under his back end, and just stuffed him into the carrier, back end first.  She's a champion.  Though it was nail-bitingly frustrating to stand back and not assist in this last night, I'm very glad that Joyce grabbed up the last cat.  It's her colony really, and very symbolic that it be her (and the trust she engendered) that sealed the deal.

Because he had shown tame tendencies, before we took him anywhere else, we took him to the nearest vet to scan for a microchip ID.  But he had none.  So he's in my recovery cage till tomorrow, when Sara will drive him up to join his buddies at the farm in the country.

The last thing I did as we were cleaning up our gear from the trapping site was grab up the bowls I would fill up on the north side.  There aren't any more cats who need them there, though there is one skunk who came by the night before who's going to be mighty disappointed at missing the free meals.

I think I'll go down tomorrow and post a sign, "To the friends of the cats" and explain a little about where they've gone.  Anyone who works nearby and has seen us there trapping lately has been really pleased to know that they're being relocated.

I can't tell you how glad I am to have this done. 

Real post and photos to follow...this was just too exciting not to get the news up right away!

100 pounds of female

Long sleeved T-shirt

Fleece turtleneck

Fleece zip-up cardigan

Fall jacket (padded, lined)

Cotton tights

Extra pair of socks

Sneakers with thick soles (not crappy little Keds)

Jeans

Fleece sweatpants

Two pair of gloves (switched to fleece mittens for the last hour)

Ball cap

Ear muffs

Add:

5 degrees Celsius (41F for the Americans)

2.5 hours not moving, watching a cat trap.

I have a poor surface-area-to-volume ratio.  Bad thermoregulation.  No insulation.  I believe the technical term is "freeze-baby."  To me, Hell is cold, not hot.  I wound up with numb toes, numb fingertips and the cold getting deep into me through all the layers.  I'll be getting into a hot bath soon.

Here's the advice needed part:

Lincoln the cat didn't go near the drop trap.  He was hungry, though.  He likes my mom's turkey gravy.  He's also lonely, now that his pals are all gone.  He responds very well to Joyce.  She can pat him.  And pat him and pat him.  She thinks he may not be a feral (he's a late addition to the boxcar family, only arriving in May this year).

Joyce is too hesitant to just grab him and stuff him into a carrier or throw a towel over him and snare him that way.  Sara or I would do it, but he won't come to us.  He trusts Joyce.  It's almost harder to catch this relatively friendly cat than a fully feral one.  Anybody got any ideas?

I'm thinking tomorrow she puts food in an open carrier and sits beside it.  He comes to her, she pats and pats him and hopefully, he finds his own way into the carrier.  But it will still probably require her having to boost his back in the last bit and slam the door shut.  But I'm open to other suggestions, too.

 

We got Pretty Girl with the drop trap tonight! 

I didn't get photos during the process, because it took three of us to make it work, and work it was.  Here are some photos showing the setup:

This is the distance we were working from.  I was Wile E. Coyote on the top of the hillock, holding the string.  That red box in the distance holds up the front edge of the trap, and the little brown square is the portal at the front of the trap (the trap is flat on the ground at this moment).  Sara was to my right, holding a blanket to throw over the trap when we got a cat.  And Joyce sat on the red stairs, to help lure Pretty Girl toward the trap with some food (Pretty Girl comes to Joyce).  Here's a better view of the trap when we reset it later. 

The trap is propped up.  It's made of weighted PVC pipe lengths, with plastic chicken wire across the top (not really visible here).  And under it you place a plate of gooshy food to tempt the cat into the strike zone.  When you yank the cord, the red box pops out, and the trap drops on the cat.  Two people run over and stand on the sides of the trap so the cat can't throw it off if they start thrashing around.  Someone drops a blanket over the trap to calm the cat and keep it from thrashing.  Then (this is why a third person is helpful) someone bungees the back end of a trap with a rear access panel to that wooden door, then one lifts that little panel in the wooden frame, and hopefully the cat goes into the regular trap from the drop trap.  At which point you replace the wooden panel and the rear access panel of the box trap.  Neat as you please.

In theory.

This worked to a point.  We had Pretty Girl trapped, then covered the regular trap with a towel, so it became the desired dark hidey-hole, and began to lift the blanket off the drop trap.  She did as expected, and darted into the regular trap.  Then, perhaps because of her trap experience this morning, darted right back into the drop trap, because we weren't quick enough with putting the barriers back up between the two!  Then she wouldn't budge to go back into the box trap.  It took us about fifteen more minutes of poking and squirting and pushing (all through the plastic chicken wire), to turn her around (because she pointed her butt to it), and we still only got her head into the wooden opening. 

It's important to note that Pretty Girl is not a slim cat.  The wooden opening is about 8 inches across.  We know she would fit through, because she already did it once.  But if you think it's hard to stuff your cat into a carrier, try stuffing a traumatized semi-feral fat cat into an eight inch opening, working through chicken wire, when you can barely fit your (gloved) fingers through the holes, and can't get purchase on, say, the cat's butt to give her a really good shove.

I wound up convincing Sara to lift the edge of the drop trap a few inches (breaking Rule #1 of drop trapping:  Never Lift the Edge of the Trap While the Cat is in It, because even a fat feral will suddenly pull a Houdini and squeeze out those few inches).  And I stuck my gardening gloved hands in and unbraced her feet from the edge of the wood, and shoved, and finally, after five more minutes of struggle, we got her to move.  The final thing that did it, though was again, manipulating light and dark.  We covered the far end of the trap we wanted her to go into, and exposed the transition point.  And squirted her with the plant sprayer some more, for emphasis.  Against all these forces, she moved.

I should point out at this time that I thought from the beginning, Pretty Girl would be the easiest cat to get.  Boy was I wrong.

With all that commotion having gone on, it was unlikely we'd get another cat tonight, but after Pretty Girl went to Joyce's place, Sara and I saw Lincoln around, so we reset the trap for him.

By now, we were trying to trap a black cat in the dark.  Which meant keeping a flashlight on the trap so we could see if he went in.  But it wasn't happening, and also by now, I was kind of shaky with hunger and exertion (Laurie's new Rule #1 of Trapping:  When you go trapping at 5 p.m., eat dinner before, not after.) and cold from being on the damp ground while wrestling with Pretty Girl, getting the knees of my jeans wet, and my gloves, and the wind had picked up, too.  So we called it a night around 7:15.  But we're feeling pretty good, all told.  The Boxcar Colony is down to one cat, and Pretty Girl will never live outside again.

 Oh, and I almost forgot to add:

While I was waiting for Sara to come back after driving Pretty Girl and Joyce to Joyce's place, I took these awesome photos of the sky.

 

There are SO many other things I'd rather do on a Sunday morning (several of them without leaving the bed), but the first two hours of this Sunday morning were spent cat trapping at the boxcars again.  We're down to Pretty Girl and Lincoln.  Pretty Girl showed up right after we got there and set up the traps, and did a big circuit around them, but didn't really approach.  Both Sara and I had previously-opened cans of food that had been saved in the fridge.  It wasn't till I took a walk over to the nearest grocery store and got some new cans and popped the top so she could hear and added the fresh stuff to the bait that she started to take any real interest.

After some tense moments, she approached the double-ended trap -- one where both ends flap up, so the cat can see through it like a tunnel and possibly doesn't feel as hemmed it as with a regular trap.  And the cat doesn't have to go as far in to be trapped, only halfway, to trip it, because the trip plate is in the middle, not near the end.  Then both ends snap shut.

In theory.

Pretty Girl nibbled her agonizingly slow way in, with some false starts and backing out, and tripped the trap.  But she wasn't far enough in for the door behind her to close cleanly; her butt was still partway out, and she wiggled backwards and shot off under the boxcars again.  Bugger!  Now the chances of getting her to go into any trap, even a regular one-ended trap again any time soon are slim to none.

We'll be going out tonight and may have to resort to our last-chance strategy:  the drop trap.

If it looks like a cartoon contraption, well, that's the principle it works on.  It's a slightly more advanced version of Wile E. Coyote's "box on a stick with a string" kind of trap.  We literally yank on a cord when the right cat is under it, to make it fall.  Further updates later tonight if we deploy it.

On another note:  if you're fascinated by any of these cat-trapping goings-on, or squeed at any of the cute rescue kitten and foster cat photos I've put up, and can spare a few clicks to support Annex Cat Rescue, the rescue group I volunteer with, the Animal Rescue Site (which many of you already know and click on daily) and Petfinder are holding votes to award cash grants to animal rescue groups (“shelters”).  ACR is eligible because ACR is a member of Petfinder.  The prizes are:
 
Grand Prize:  One $25,000 grant
Runner Up:  One $10,000 grant
State Winners*:  Fifty-four $1,000 state grants
Weekly Winners**:  Eleven $1,000 weekly grants
*The organization with the most votes from each U.S. state, one in Washington D.C., and one in Puerto Rico, as well as the top two organizations in Canada, will receive a grant of $1,000 at the end of the Challenge.
**The organization with the most votes during a week will receive a grant of $1,000. Each weekly voting period begins on a Monday and ends at midnight PST the following Sunday. Participants are eligible for only one weekly prize during the Challenge. Winning a weekly prize does not preclude receiving a final prize.
You can vote for ACR once each day.  To do so:
-          Go to www.theanimalrescuesite.com
-          Click on the purple button marked “click here to give – it’s free!” (which I know a lot of you do anyway)
-          You will be redirected to a “thank you” page.  At the bottom of that page, click on the button marked “Animal Rescue Site $100,000 shelter challenge”
-          There is a pink box in the middle of that page where you fill in Annex Cat Rescue, select Canada and Ontario, then “search”
-          Then vote for ACR!  You’ll be asked to confirm your vote by identifying an animal in a picture. (It's not hard.)

Thanks in advance to anybody who does!