37 posts tagged “rescue”
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.)
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.
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.
Just for fun, because I recently received a grownup photo of one of my boxcar colony kitten rescues, I thought I'd do a then and now comparison.
Then: at about six-weeks, living rough:
He's one of a trio that didn't get rescued till four months old, but socialized nicely, anyway.
And here's a portrait taken by his new family, age 3.
Look how refined! He likes to sit on his mom's piano, even while it's being played (she plays professionally and teaches students in the home). I've titled the photo "Oscar on piano" to keep it straight in my voluminous boxcar cat photo files, but his name actually became Meow Ming.
He also looks a LOT like my cat Sodapop (no relation).
So, apparently, there's a bit of a story about ducklings in the Roy Thomson Hall fountain this year. Someone is really looking out for them.
I saw ducks arriving ages ago. A male and a female, then two more males (I saw all four at once one day). I don't know who moved on or what, but then I was variously seeing one or two males, and didn't see the female for a while. Granted, I only go by in the glassed in pedestrian concourse twice a day, briefly, so it's not like my observations are that meaningful.
Reading about ducklings hatching in other places had me watching the fountain wistfully the week or so before I went to Martha's Vineyard, in case the female had just been hiding, sitting on a nest all this time, but no, didn't see her or any ducklets (or duckaluckalings, as cranky calls them).
Then I went away for a week, and that's when they hatched, of course. I saw nine of them on Tuesday morning. Going home after work Tuesday, there were no mama and babies, but a note on the glass saying that a new female and eleven ducklings had arrived at the fountain Tuesday afternoon (guided over from some undisclosed location nearby -- they often nest in planters on high-rise terraces and balconies), and as soon as possible, they would be relocated to the local Humber River. See, the powers that be in charge of the fountain relocate the families every year to where they'll thrive. The note mentioned that they can't stay in the fountain because of a very territorial male. So, one batch had already been moved by the Toronto Wildlife Service, and a second batch was now waiting. They must have got moved right quick, because there were no mama and babies Wednesday and Thursday.
Friday morning, I go by, and lo and behold, yet another female and seven fuzzlings that I could count. I got three photos snapped before they paddled around the far side of a large planter out of sight.
Friday, end of day, no ducklings any more, and another note on the glass letting us know that the new mom and nine babies been moved early that afternoon, thanks to Toronto Wildlife Service coming out for a third time in one week. You gotta be impressed by the response time, even though it means we downtown denizens didn't get more than a few tantalizing glimpses of them.
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.
