The Return of Snowball, the Cat

Remember Snowball, the cat I accidentally and with no malice stole from my neighbor, the cop? Turns out I needn't have worried that Snowball would cease to exist in my life. As fate would have it, the furry little bugger camps out on our back porch daily.

This causes immense dismay to Lucy, our eldest cat. Lucy hates cats. All cats. Frankly, we're not quite sure she recognizes herself as one of the species. If she ever pays attention when she passes a mirror, she's in for a nasty shock.

Lucy stares down her nemesis, Snowball. (Click to enlarge)When Snowball appears at the screen door, Lucy launches an all out attack. Back arched, hissing, growling, swatting and charging at the screen, giving out prolonged growls... this is one fired up cat.

Not that it matters in the least to Snowball. Lucy outweighs him by a good ten pounds but he seems to recognize she can't get at him and presses his nose up to the screen as he looks in and mows. As I sit upstairs typing this, I can in fact hear him at the back door like a low-level siren: "Moooowww.  Mrrrooooooow. Mmmmmmmoooooowwwww...."  Thank God I didn't keep him. I can't fathom having two cats in the house that never shut up.

Olivia slinks to a corner of the sofa and ignores them both.

My poor Lucy. I don't want to close Snowball out, nor do I want to deny my cats fresh air which is why I open the door in the first place. I'm trying to hug and love on Lucy when Snowball is around so she associates him with good things.

Given the blood she's drawn from me, we have some work left in this area.

Hugs to you and your cats.

Trap and Release

I e-mailed my lurking kitty problem to my cat writers list-serv and was informed I need to do a trap and release. This consists of my buying or borrowing a humane trap, baiting it, catching kitty, taking kitty to vet and paying for a spay or neuter (also checking to see if the cat is nursing, indicating kittens are present) and then releasing.  That is my task for the weekend then--finding a trap and instigating Operation Big-Ass Kitty Catch.

I was feeling a little "grrrrr" yesterday about the situation. It's not stressful, but it's just one more thing to add to the list, you know? Then I received an e-mail from a writer colleague I've met at annual Cat Writer's conferences. A somewhat shy woman with a huge heart and passion for saving animals and she-doesn't-even-know-how-good-she-is writing skills.

She's dealing with an incredibly heart-wrenching and painful situation regarding some cats she's trying to convince the city to rescue from a homeless man. He carries them around in locked containers on his bike and while he might feed them, the cats are suffering from being cramped, have urine scalds on their legs and have to rest in their own feces. No one is listening to her and she has been told in annoyance by more than one cop and city official, "Lighten up, lady. They're just cats." You can read the full story here: http://www.petsweekly.com/Stories/Hostages.html.

I admire the work of the woman who wrote this. I won't go into details because they're too horrifying to mention, but she rescues cats that have been abused and tortured. There are some sick f---ing people out there in the world who like to take out their aggression on innocent animals. I don't have the stomach or mental strength to deal with even once what she deals with on a regular basis. Thank God there are people like her in the world, willing to do what the rest of us shield our eyes from.

Everyone please say a prayer for the cats suffering in the above story.

Big Ass Cat

I mentioned earlier the large (17 pounds if it's a day) long-haired black and white cat I'd seen lurking in the crawlspace under our home. Yesterday I hear two cats yowling and step out my front door to see big-ass kitty chasing Spike, our neighbors cat, across our yard.

"She's out! I'll close up the hole!" I think.

Kitty heard my thoughts, stopped in mid-lunge, and sprinted back to the house, pausing to stick her tongue out at me in the universal "nynah-nynah" tradition before diving in the hole leading to the crawlspace like Bugs Bunny diving in his rabbit hole to escape Elmer Fudd.

Crap.

I posed my quandry on my cat writers list-serv. I don't want to close the hole and trap the cat under my house, but if she has kittens, I don't want to separate her from them. Their advice is to set a trap, catch kitty, have her spayed/neutered. That doesn't solve the problems if there are kittens under there, but I really don't know how to address that. Our crawlspace is huge and rambling and in some areas there are only inches of crawlspace that a cat could squeeze through but a human never could.

I'm going to see if there are any trap and release groups in my area and if not, I guess Blair and I will be baiting some cat traps this weekend.

That's a bad kitty. =)

It's Why They Call Me The Cat Woman

There's a new cat in the picture.  Temporarily.

We have 6 steps leading up to our front porch, which has a brick surround. In the brick on the left side, there is what looks like a heat vent that fits into a rectangular hole in the brick. The vent thingee falls out quite often and we have to pop it back in.

Yesterday while I was rolling the trash can back in from the curb, I noticed the gaping hole where the vent had fallen out. Then to my surprise, I saw the head of a large, long-haired black and white cat staring out at me from the vent hole, looking just as surprised, as if I had interrupted a private gathering.

Seeing the cat underneath our house solved the mystery of why Lucy, our other black and white cat, has been sniffing baseboards and then emitting hissing noises for the past week. I thought we had a mouse. Wrong. We have a cat.

I tried calling the kitty out and you can guess where that got me. So I did what any cat lover would do...I set food out.

My concern is this is a pregnant cat or a cat that's recently delivered. Our crawlspace would make a lovely feline birthing facility.

As it stands, I can't put the grate back in because I don't want to trap the cat. But I'm concerned other critters and prowling neighborhood cats will see that as a "Welcome, come on in" invite. So I'll send Blair crawling under the house this weekend to ferret out any kitty squatters.

Somehow, the strays know how to find me...