Sunday, June 20, 2010

Four Kittens and Their Mom With No Place to Call Home

I went and herded the calico from the down town colony into a trap and then laboriously dug her kittens out of a tight utility room. I'm not as flexible as I used to be. This is the colony with a neighbor who wants to trap them. If it is the neighbor I think it is, they have two cats they allow to free roam. So, his vindictiveness towards these outside cats is ridiculous. He must see that. Well, on second thought, I guess he doesn't. I do not know if his cats are two I caught and got fixed or not.

The wife of the caretaker couple is very nice and is going to have her husband talk to the man. In the meantime, I am trying hard to find anywhere who would take even some of these cats, including the calico.

The calico originally was a kitten from a few houses down. They were former drug addicts and had an unfixed female cat whom I got fixed. She had four kittens in a back room that was at least waist deep in junk. There was no way to get to them and they were too little then to be fixed. She claimed she would call me when they were 8 weeks and that she would work on taming them. She never did call me and did not return messages I left on her phone nor notes I left on her door. When I finally did get ahold of her said, "Oh, I think they wandered off or died." And that was that.

They didn't die. They ended up desperate and eating on the porch of the old man. And they reproduced. I caught two of them in the first round of ten I caught at the old man's house, after he called when his vet gave him my number. The torbi female, this calico's sister, never had a litter. The other nine cats I took to that clinic from this one location were all males. The calico had her first litter last fall and only one survived. I caught him in November and he was fixed.

November was the third time I was there. The second time I caught two more big males. The third time, in November, I trapped two males, including the calico's teen son, the only survivor of her first litter, and another wild male. Then I caught Tiny Tim, the all gray male with the shattered rear leg knee from a dog attack. I also crawled under the house and retrieved three kittens born to a tame black mom, abandoned pregnant. That was Black Pearl, and Toby, one of her kittens, is the one who died this last winter of pancreatic problems so tragically.

So five of those seven did not go back. They got two cats, both tame, who had been abandoned, fixed before I came on the scene, a white female and a orange tux bobtail male. This is not a good neighborhood in that people do not fix their cats in that area.

There is one more cat to be fixed, maybe two, a roam in black and white. If all have survived, which is doubtful, and I return this calico, there would be 19 cats who eat there, but at least four or five of those caught, the old man thinks, are owned. I know that at least four have been tame. We got them fixed anyway. No collar or id. Abandonment rates are sky high in that area. No way to know if they are or are not owned. Since he was feeding them, he declared, "if they come on my porch, they are going to get fixed." That was a rightful declaration. The couple believe there are 13 cats still eating there, including this calico and including the two they got fixed, one of whom they now call their own cat. So, if I could find a place for about six of them, probably the neighbor would back off.

It is primarily a male colony. Why? Because people don't fix their males, and they start to spray so they abandon them. That's why. When people feed strays like that, often most are males for this very reason. People are idiots.

The man off Grand Prairie, who has five strays in his backyard wants them gone, or, he says, he'll get someone to take them away and euthanize them. Of course he wouldn't feed them, he scoffed, when I asked. This isn't a good world for cats. Nor people who care about them. I'm trying, however, to find an option for the cats in both situations. If anyone reading this knows of someone willing to take in barn or shop cats, let me know a.s.a.p.

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