A Comedy of Errors (or something like that)

Sometimes I’m torn on this blog between talking about my life as it is, blemishes and all, or playing up the good aspects. I want people to think that it’s easy to love and care for animals, and that it’s easy to be vegan. And it is, mostly, and then there are the times where the season lines up to kick you one last time before the weather gets really cold or something like that. If nothing else, talking about the bad will show that you can still make a difference even if you aren’t perfect.

First of all I will paint a picture for you of how utterly ridiculous I am. I don’t really like to buy clothing, but of course I do from time to time since I must, but I tend to wear things way past the point where they need to be retired, and I keep telling myself I can get away with it one last time. Sadly my favorite t-shirt is full of holes and I just can’t give it up. The holes started from medicating sick cats. I’d grab them and they’d kick and rip up my shirt, and sometimes my stomach in the process. Then the holes grew. I can’t let it go, it’s my softest most comfy shirt, but it’s maybe getting on the obscene side. Sigh. Then I have a half slip that I wear with my longer skirts to work. Well it’s only about a decade old, it should have plenty of life left right? No, the elastic had been going for a while, but it decided to finally all let go with a final hurrah and fall off me and around my ankles, right by my front door as several male road re-pavers stood not twenty feet away. I quickly just stepped out of it and balled it up and tried to retain some shred of dignity, but it was not a good moment for me. Luckily the skirt itself doesn’t have elastic, but buttons, which happily decided to stay on for the time being. But I find myself slipless and it’s a sad state of affairs.

Next up is illness in the family which is pretty serious and requiring some time spent on the road lately and other time spent sad and trying to find the least awful solution, knowing that all solutions have drawbacks. General stress and everything else adds to the heap.

All the same I decided to go ahead with plans to take more feral cats to the feral cat clinic this Sunday. Now given the givens I could have thought of many things I’d rather do with my Saturday night than stumble around in the dark and cold with a growing cough trapping feral cats, but then it’s not about me, so there we were, Sean and I.

Now Saturday morning we went around to talk to people, to tell them we were trapping and ask for permission to put traps in their yards. We went to one house that’s near the school where they feed every day on their front porch. There are always kittens at this house. We knocked on the door and a man answered. A teenaged boy who I’ve spoken with before hovered behind him. We gave our spiel and the man said “Not my cats, take them, go take all.” So we backed up and said “The cats are coming back, but they’ll be fixed and vaccinated.” He shrugged and seemed to be saying “do whatever you want.” The teenager speaks English perfectly in my experience, so while we might have doubted the man fully understood us, I felt like if there was an issue the boy would have spoken up.

So at dusk we arrived and set ten traps in their yard. Then they came home, the man, a woman, and the teenaged boy. Right away the woman started yelling at us. I told her the man had given us permission and that we weren’t hurting the cats, but she just kept screaming “Not in MY house! Not in MY house!” I tried to explain while Sean raced around retrieving traps, but she just kept screaming in my face, and then shouted “You put traps anywhere, over there, over there, their yard! But not in MY house! I don’t want do like that! Not in MY house!” So that was it. But we never would have put the traps there if we didn’t think we had permission and I was hurt that she couldn’t even try to be nice and not scream in my face. A simple “I don’t want you here” would have sufficed. Or better yet “There’s a misunderstanding, but I don’t want you trapping here.”

And it’s also incredibly frustrating because her years of feeding without altering any of the cats has given rise to a huge problem in our neighborhood. I gather she puts down the same amount of dry kibble every day. Many of the cats she feeds appear emaciated, but they hang around anyway. The cats in and around her porch are crowded there and nearly all show signs of active URI infections. The dominant cats chase the kittens out as soon as they’re weaned, and this has given rise the many satellite colonies we encounter. Though thin, the satellite cats appear healthier as the URI seems absent from those locations. So the less dominant cats move out a block or two and subsist on trash, but are also more likely to be hit by cars or have serious conflicts with human residents who don’t want them there.

Also when someone was poisoning the cats with rat poison and Sean took them to the emergency vet, he went and tried to talk to people. He went to that house, knowing they feed, to nicely try to warn them about what was going on. He thought they would be worried about the cats and maybe put down extra food or try to keep them close to home until the danger was over. However their response was “Not my cats. Don’t care.” And they slammed the door in his face.

So they don’t care if the cats are poisoned, they don’t care when they get hit by cars. They don’t care enough to get them vaccinated or altered. They don’t care that sometimes the kittens are very sick and just wander out into the street in obvious distress. But they DO care if we try to put some traps in their yard for an hour or two.

But it really messed up our trapping efforts. We hadn’t asked their next door neighbors if we could put traps in their yards, because we thought we had a place to trap. Plus all the commotion scared off many of the cats. In the end we only trapped eight cats after a full and exhausting night of trapping. I got a few hours of sleep and then took the cats to the clinic.

Then in case my day wasn’t bad enough one of the cats died in surgery. This almost never happens. It has never happened to me before actually, but it did this time. They say that the cat had a pre-existing condition that made his heart give out. But I was just devastated.

I also think the feeders don’t like that we’re ear-tipping the cats, but with sixty cats who are mostly black and white and almost identical, I can’t not ear-tip. We actually trapped four cats we’d gotten previously and the ear-tips allowed us to know instantly they were already fixed and let them back out.

Sometimes I feel like this whole thing is breaking my heart. I only got into this because Sean and I couldn’t stand coming across dead and dying cats or obviously sick cats while walking the dogs. I’m only trying to do my best to help a really messed up situation. But I could have spent my Saturday night many other ways than getting screamed at for my efforts by a person largely responsible for the problem.

The bottom line though is that we’ve fixed 18 cats, most of them female and returned them to the colony. That’s a serious reduction in the kittens born. We’ve removed 5 tame cats, and thus eliminated all the kittens they would have produced. Sadly though the cat I named Gerry on his form passed away yesterday. I’m sorry Gerry, I would have fed you if I’d had the chance. I meant to make things better for you, not worse.