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Please Support TNR
I normally have to travel great distances on my pet rescue missions, but not this time. A few weeks before Halloween, two feline street orphans appeared in my own backyard. I still can’t decide if it was chance, or fate, or if some kind hearted spirit led them to me, but I knew that I had to help them.
When I let my dogs out into our backyard one October morning, I suddenly noticed some sort of movement in my outdoor dog kennel. I had constructed this kennel two years prior to temporarily house a feral dog that I had rescued from the mean city streets. I also posted his rescue story - 'Saving Shadow.’
When I approached the dog kennel this time, I soon spotted two sets of feline eyes staring back at me from deep inside its covered dog house. One set of eyes belonged to a gorgeous orange and white tabby; the other to a small black and white cat.
These two cats and I now stood silently staring at each other in the frigid dawn air, until my dogs soon rushed up to the kennel to see what was going on. These two felines now quickly rushed out of the kennel, jumped over my six-foot fence, and were gone.
I now wondered if they would ever return; but I didn’t have to wait very long for the answer – they were both back inside my outdoor dog kennel the very next night, and every night after. So now I began putting some food out in the kennel for them every day, and they both now very gratefully gobbled up my daily food offerings every night.
I now suspected that they were a bonded pair – a male and a female – and I knew that before long they would be having a litter of kittens in their new kennel home. So I now decided to trap them, to take them to my vet, and to get them ‘fixed’ before that happened.
I eventually set and baited two cat traps with some very enticing food, and I placed these two cat traps inside the dog kennel. The orange tabby was inside one of the traps the very next morning, and soon on its way to the animal hospital.
As I had suspected, this tabby was the male in this bonded feline pair, and my vet agreed to neuter and vaccinate him. But we now discovered something hideous – ‘Casey’ as I had now named him, had no tail – just a ragged furry stub. After examining what remained, my vet and I soon decided that either a dog had pinned down poor Casey and ripped off his tail, or some hideous human being had hacked it off.
While catching Casey had been quite easy, his tiny mate remained very leery of my traps for the next several nights. She wouldn’t enter either of the traps to eat, and she was now starving. So after several nights of attempting to trap her, I decided to place a large plate of food outside the traps for her.
The next morning when I went out to the kennel, I expected to find an empty plate of food. Instead, I surprisingly found this tiny black and white female now inside one of my traps. It was the same trap that her mate had entered several nights prior, and I now suspected that she had smelled Casey inside of it, and she had entered the trap because of his scent.
I now whisked her off to the animal hospital as well, and I named her ‘Catrina.’ Thankfully, she wasn’t pregnant or currently nursing any kittens, so I had her spayed and vaccinated, and brought both her and Casey home.
Since I had helped some feline welfare organizations in the past with TNR (Trap, Neuter, Return), I now thought about releasing Casey and Catrina back into my outdoor kennel to live out their lives together outdoors. In my opinion, TNR is the most humane method of helping America’s far too numerous homeless feral felines, since most animal shelters today quickly deem them to be ‘unadoptable’ and very sadly euthanize them.
But winter was now rapidly approaching, and the temperature had already dipped into the teens, with a wind chill below zero. After discussing it with my spouse, we both soon decided to let Casey and Catrina reside in the feral cat room in our home.
We already have two other bonded feral cats living with us – Jailhouse Joe and Jasmine – who had both very hungrily wandered into one of my dog traps at the county jail last winter while I out there attempting to catch a homeless little dog living on its grounds.
My spouse seems to have a way with these extremely wary and un-trusting street cats – old Jailhouse Joe now purrs with delight at her sight, rushes right up to her, and loves being petted by her. I’m sure that either Casey or Catrina, or both of them, will soon warm up to her as well.
Now two bonded pairs of feral cats live with us; all four are getting along together just fine; and all four now seem to be very appreciative of daily meals, a little kindness and compassion, and of being in out of the bitter cold.
There are very sadly millions of homeless cats like Casey and Catrina in America today. Please help your local TNR groups any way that you can. And please spay and neuter your own pets.
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