I’m afraid I might be moving in the direction of becoming the neighborhood "cat lady." I might be going there involuntarily, but I'm still going there. My life is carpeted with cats.
A feral female cat brought her litter into my house, one-by-one, in the wake of a heavy rainfall. She carried each one by the scruff of the neck through the pet door I’d installed years ago for my own, my one-and-only cat. The feral stowed her kittens in a cupboard whose door I’d carelessly left open. Two of the litter of six were dead – apparently drowned, as if the mother might have ill-advisedly made her original nest behind a downspout somewhere. But that left four kittens plus the mother herself for me to feed and tend to. All the City’s animal shelters are full up, what with the bad economy. None of the no-kill shelters I contacted had room for one more cat - much less for four or five. So anyplace that would have accepted them would no doubt have euthanized them immediately. That's left me to soldier on, caring for this superfluity of cats as best I can.
The shelters told me that my best option was to go the "catch-and-release" route. In recent years, this has been deemed the best way of dealing with the growing population of stray cats. You get a larger Have-A-Hart trap (or else the shelters will loan you one) - then you set about trapping any stray. You make an appointment with the clinic, then you set the trap and hope to catch your target animal. If you succeed, you take the animal in to be fixed, then you re-claim it and, after tending to it through a convalescent period, you release it back into the alleys. While the animal is in the clinic, it also has one ear "tipped," that is, it has a part of one ear cut off to identify it to animal control workers as a cat that is being monitored through this program. You promise to put out food for the cat a couple times a week for as long as you see it in the neighborhood.
So I set to work. After the kittens had gotten old enough, I lured two of them into traps and shuntled them to the clinic early the next morning. (Operations are performed first thing, just as in hospitals for humans.) I was lucky. Both kittens turned out to be males, so the cost for "fixing" them was minimal. I was criticized for having brought one of the kittens in a carrying case. (I only had one Hav-A-Hart metal trap.) The attendant at the clinic told me that they usually require you to bring animals in the standard traps, so they can inject them with anesthesia right while they are in the cage. With carrying cases, the clinic attendants are put in the position of having to decant the animal into the open where it can be injected - and many strays are extremely aggressive, inflicting injuries on the attendants in the course of their attempts to restrain and inject it. However since I was there, they agreed to go ahead and fix both animals.
While I hadn't been able to socialize the kittens enough to make them readily adoptable, they were somewhat tame and posed no threat to the clinic workers. So all went well. They were fixed, tipped, and also had ID chips implanted. I came back to claim them at the end of the day.
Males only require a 24-hour period of convalescence. I had prepared one of my bathrooms as a recovery room, spreading the floor with clean towels and newspaper. I put bowls of food and water around and released the two into the dimly lit quarters.
When I carefully peeked in on them six hours later, my heart almost broke. They were wedged behind the toilet, hugging each other for dear life. They looked dazed, in ultimate despair. At that moment, I felt that burgeoning cat population or not - this was just too cruel a trauma to inflict on any creature.
However things quickly improved. Towards the end of the 24-hour recovery period, they started coming out from behind the toilet, nibbling at their food a little, and looking more like themselves. I gave it a little more time. Then I heard an insistent "meowing" coming from the bathroom. When I checked on them this time, they bounced out, ready to greet the world again - seemingly none the worse for wear. What's more, they didn't seem to hold a grudge against me. They were as tentatively friendly as they had been before, apparently not quite associating me with the rigors they'd just endured.
They had already been used to playing outside on my patio before their operations. Now with spring having fully blossomed, they wanted to go outside where their siblings and their mother were already spending most of their time.
I was soon forced to ban the mother and "Gang of Four" from the house altogether because of fights with my own cat and because of their general obstreperousness. But I doubt that these cats will ever truly be "alley cats" in the sense the catch-and-release program anticipated. In reality, I’m destined to be much more involved with them than merely monitoring their alley prowlings.
I set up quarters for them in my garage - complete with heater, blankets, litter boxes, and two or three delectable meals a day, always including some treats such as sardines or broasted chicken. The kittens have thrived into sleek, plump adults under this regimen. They rarely stray into the alley, but instead have become affixed to me. Only one will let me pat him, and that only in skittish snatches. That’s probably all to the good, because if these cats were to try to buddy up to other humans, there would likely be horrible consequences.
I named the friendliest of the cats "Tux," in reference to the way his black-and-white patterning looks like formal wear. He and his siblings now generally confine themselves to my yard and to my garage, with access through a pet door I installed in the garage. Their mother, an extremely savage, savvy, always on-guard alley cat, also comes back into the fold quite often now – along with several of her suitors and several other strays who have discovered the free eats I’m handing out. So I repeat - I'm carpeted with cats.
At night, the cats play happily with each other. They climb up to my roof using the ladder I have permanently in place and chase each other merrily from one parapet wall to the other and back again. I can hear the pitter-patter of their little feet overhead into the wee hours. I’d always hoped to have the pitter-patter of little feet around the house – but I never thought it would be cats’ paws!
The man who is renting a room from me is an animal-lover and tens to the crew when I'm away. I'll have to get busy myself though and trap the other cats who are becoming regulars in my yard in order to take them one-by-one to be fixed. I’ll especially have to try to corral the Mama cat – or else come next spring, I’ll have ANOTHER litter deposited with me. This means I’m facing virtually living at the veterinary clinic. I might as well bring a tent and set up camp in their reception room.
Most days, all this responsibility and the new, unwanted identity of “cat lady” makes me feel a little like Tux and Cumber (after his similarly formal cummerbund appearance) did after their operations – frozen in maimed futility. I don’t know where this can lead or where it can end. So I just take it day-by-day.
There are moments of grace though. I've tried practicing what Oprah preached about ending each day with a recounted list of things you were grateful for that day.
Even as I was experiencing a recent moment with the cats, I knew it would head my list of moments to be grateful for that night. Dusk was just fading into darkness and I was hurrying to re-attach some privacy fencing that the winds had flung loose from the chain-link fencing surrounding my yard. This involved hoisting 30-40 pound panels of plastic privacy fencing into place with one hand, while tying them to the chain-link fence with the other. It was almost an impossible task for one person, but two people could have accomplished it easily in seconds. However, I saw my renter slip past me through the yard wraith-like, to take refuge in his own digs – well away from the work he saw afoot in the yard. So obviously, I wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter.
I continued to struggle. I just wasn’t strong enough to hold a panel in place with one hand. But then I hit upon a system of leveraging the panel into its proper position using pole extension sections from one of my pruning saws. The job was still difficult using this technique, but it was do-able. It was cold out, but not bone-chillingly cold. It was more the bracing coldness that spurs a person to a task. The gang-of-four and even their mother cat rallied around in curiosity over the proceedings. I’d never seen them so friendly! They seemed to enjoy watching this project take shape – privacy panel flapping, rope curling out of my overall pockets. Tux even came forward next to me and rose up, putting his forepaws on the lower part of the panel, adding his little bit of weight to help hold the panel in place while I tied the top of it to the chain-link fence. I felt we were a team. The cats’ company was encouraging. We were working in tacit harmony to accomplish a goal, there in the spicing night air, with a full moon rising.
When the job was finished, I sat down on a plastic patio chair and let myself feel the glowing warmth of satisfaction at having completed a necessary job. It was as good as having a campfire in a pine-tingly woods. The cats seemed to feel the same sense of satisfaction at having participated in a job well-done. Now they could play! They started to chase each other in circles across the patio, into the undergrowth. Now Tux was in the lead, now Cumber, now Mama. When one caught another, the two would roll joyously over and over – become one furry ball of exuberance.
It was indeed a moment of grace. In addition to the sheer sensuous delight of the moment and the satisfaction of having secured my privacy fencing – I also had the satisfaction of seeing the animals' sheer joy-in-living. All the months of inconvenience I'd had and will have, tending to these cats that were obtruded into my life – had some meaning. Through it all, I had succeeded in fostering some little creatures into a full and healthy life. I’d given them the epitome of feline felicity.
