The Boneless Cat

Four and a half months since spotting a mother cat and her three young kittens on our back porch, the three-ring kitten circus has dispersed.  (See the three immediately preceding posts, but one.)

The mother cat was quickly adopted out.

The two TNRed cats are spotted infrequently.  At the height of the recent storms, we put out food and water.  Someone else in the neighborhood is feeding, for the food wasn't devoured as we expected.

Pictures of two of the three kittens sat on the Charles River Alley Cats website until late January, when their listing disappeared.  We haven't heard back from our CRAC helpers in time of need, but we presume the kittens got better socialization than we could provide and were successfully adopted.

The remaining kitten now has the form and gait of a mature cat, retaining the lunatic playfulness of a kitten.  Boneless cat used to be just words to us, but this kitten sleeps upside down, four legs akimbo, belly exposed, utterly secure of her place in the world.  It is gratifying to have made our small contribution to her charming character.  It was a privilege to have provided aid to six neighborhood cats, helping to find home for four of them.

The original resident cat is still grumpy about the interloper, but she deigned to play briefly with the kitten last week.  The two of them, just now, are content to sit on the same hot radiator, dozing and peering out the window.

Charles River Alley Cats save the day

Three rescued kittens

Working with a clueless, but willing, helper, Charles River Alley Cats have saved four strays from a harsh winter.  (Skip to the bottom of this post to see how you can help save the day for other Fort Hill strays.)

To make explicit what was hinted at in previous posts, in early October, using tuna fish, we successfully enticed three kittens into the house and closed the door behind them.  Then using the kittens themselves as bait, augmented by more tuna, we were able to lure the Mother Cat into the house and close the door.

We had never really experienced the expression Climbing the walls until we saw Mother Cat levitate from floor to ceiling, seemingly counter to the laws of physics, in a wild attempt to escape.  The raw animal power was humbling to witness.

Mother Cat is a Classic Hallowe'en Cat.  What's not to love?

The trapping of these four mammals was assisted by much telephone counseling from a friend in Dorchester who manages a small feral colony and has many years experience.  We are mostly dog people, so dealing with cats for us is like negotiating with extra-terrestrials.

Enter Charles River Alley Cats.

The day after we trapping Mom and kids, we approached them at an adoption event at the Petco in Brighton, desperate for advice, and it was all business.

Friendly and empathetic, but all business:  How many cats, what was their health, what was their behavior, were there other ferals still outside, what was I feeding them?  Do they have fleas, have they been wormed?  Then it was onto How big are the kittens, they should be spayed or neutered at two pounds, are you up for trying to trap the fathers?  Are you going to adopt them, do you need help finding homes?

To cut a long story short we were able to trap and return two more strays, one who was obviously one of the fathers and a female.  We say "one of the fathers," for we, ignorant as we were, learned that the kittens in a litter may not have the same father.  Promiscuous mating can do that.

A Charles River Alley Cat trap with a post-operative Father Cat lurking in back.

We learned how to manage the feeding and the cleaning of the cage of a trapped cat with judicious use of a sheet and a cage fork.

Post-operative feral female posing with a cage fork.

We witnessed the inside loading dock of the Animal Rescue League, stuffed to the walls with about one hundred (we counted) cages of recently spayed and neutered animals.  The TNR movement has adopted a clipped ear as the signal to others that a stray has already been TNRed.

We learned that all-black cats—the classic Hallowe'en cat—are very hard to place in "forever homes."

We learned that we were totally unprepared to understand kitten- and mother cat–psychology.  Mother Cat kept horning in on our attempts to socialize the kittens.  And, the most social kitten in a litter adopts the same behavior as the least social one.  It pays to segregate the cats and socialize them individually, but let them play together.

We also learned that being entertained by a three-ring Kitten Circus in the kitchen with playtoys and ping pong balls and empty cardboard boxes was better than watching TV.

As far as input and output, it is amazing how much food moves through a nursing cat and her litter.  We have scooped more clumping litter than we ever though possible.  (What is the environmentally best way way to deal with this waste?)

We were definitely emotionally unprepared for how hard we were affected by giving up Mother Cat for adoption.  And, by how much we missed the two kitten who were passed over into the hands of more capable foster homes.


So, here's the pitch—

Charles River Alley Cats does everything they do on a shoe-string.

They charge a modest fee when you adopt through them.  But, they still need your assistance.  They need you to give them cash.  They need you to give them cat food, kitty food, cat carriers, feeding dishes, cat litter.  If you can name it, and if has to do with a cat, they can use more of it .  Check out the donation page on their web site.

Charles River Alley Cats needs you to volunteer for them.  Whether you have only thirty minutes a day to give, or carpentry skills, or just a little spare space in your garage or basement, you can help  Here is the volunteer page.

But, most of all they—and all of us—need for folk to have a care for the local cats.

• If you have a cat, get it spayed or neutered.  If you want to experience the lunacy of a three-ring Kitten Circus in your kitchen, you can adopt some already-born kittens without breeding new ones.  Or, you can temporarily foster some kittens.
• If you have a cat you can no long care for, surrender it to an organization that can; don't just dump it outside to fend for itself.  That's just not fair.
• If you have strays living in your corner of Fort Hill (and, you almost surely do), think hard whether you are able to trap-neuter-return (TNR) some or all of these co-residents.

Whether you think cats are weird and inscrutable, extra-terrestrial creatures or whether you dote on cats, there is something you can do to make life easier for these deserving, neighborhood animals.


We'll tidy up some details in a later post.

Feline Yin and Yang on Fort Hill

Two of three rescued kittens.

We've buried more than our fair share of stray cats.  It's usually during a harsh winter.  Sometimes it has been after a collision with an automobile in the summer.

It's never pretty.  It's never easy.

In the winter, one has to pick a location, clear the snow, and hope the digging isn't too difficult.  It can be a hard job of work to break up the frozen ground with a pickax or mattock.  Never mind the trouble shoveling through the damned Roxbury rocks.

In the summer, the grave has to be dug deep enough to discourage Nature's  recycling scavengers from picking up the scent, digging up the carcass, and settling down to a tasty, foetid bite to eat.

In summer or in winter, after rigor mortis has set in, it is hard to sensitively balance respect for the remains of the deceased cat with digging a reasonably sized hole for the grave. In the absence of rubber gloves, and in a howling wind, fitting the furry body into the too-small hole using only the business end of a shovel...is...well, emotionally taxing.

As we said, it's never pretty; it's never easy. And, we always hate it.

So, when Mother Cat and her litter of three kittens showed up on our porch, it seemed necessary to do the right thing.  To treat with respect the feline co-inhabitants of our little square of green space in the city.  To reduce the chances of another mid-winter burial.

And, to return thanks for the colony's work to thin out the verminous squirrel population:  three carcasses, and counting.

It's a Zoo on Fort Hill

A couple of comments at UniversalHub tell us that it's a Zoo on Fort Hill, with raccoons and skunks.  We've seen opossums, too.

And cats.  Feral cats.

A jet black mother cat was zonked out on the back porch the day before yesterday afternoon.  She had three rambunctious kittens who were alternately nursing and batting at the foliage being driven to and fro in the strong winds.  The mother was so sound asleep that we were able to approach within three feet to set down tuna and a water bowl.

By the time we returned with dry food and the camera, the mother cat was up and about, hissing and walking to the other end of the porch, attempting to draw our attention away from her litter.

Wanting to be responsible fellow urban mammals, we withdrew to watch.  Holy moley.  Nursing cats need a lot of food, for Mother Cat inhaled the tuna and then went to work with a vengeance, wolfing down the dry food.

Graduating from urban mammal to responsible urban citizens and thinking that three more fertile cats were not the best demographic addition to the neighborhood, we consulted the internet to see what we could read about feral cats.

Perhaps we could squeeze out a low-effort post to Jonas Prang, decorated with a few shameless kitty pics.  Hopefully we could figure out what to do about these cursorial carnivores.  (And, perhaps take our minds off yet more human carnage in Roxbury.)

After two hours of reading, we put the hope of a low-effort post to rest.  And, the hope of low-effort action to do the right thing by these...well...kitties.

TNR:  Trap, neuter, and return [ASPCA web site] seems to be the fashionable response to feral cats.  Trap and kill—the run-of-the-mill response to vermin—causes a vacuum effect.  Destroying a stable feral population merely invites new feline neighbors to move in to replaced the ones recently slaughtered.

A modest amount of googling for feral cats yields a stunning amount to read.  In an American society besotted with dogs and cats, why were we surprised?

So, to conclude this post we will provide just one more shameless kitty pic of our new neighbors.  And, we'll give a lightly annotated list of pages that seem useful for learning what to do about feral cats.

• Commonwealth Cats, with a Peabody mailing address, may be what we need if we can bestir ourselves to trap this mom and her kits.
• The resources page at Commonwealth Cats yields a link to the band-width-heavy web site of Alley Cat Allies a 501(c)3 organization with $4 million annual budget and net assets of $2.8M.  Perhaps they would make a small contribution so Jonas Prang can get these cats neutered.  We have to give them credit, though, for they make it easy to read their annual reports from FY 2003 to FY 2009. [3.4MB pdf]  And, they offer to send you their IRS 990, useful to see how 501(c)3s are overpaying their executive staff.
• Drop Trap Design is a blog that tells how to build and operate a drop trap.  It also tells that cats are apparently so stupid that one can trap them over and over and over again, and they never catch on to the scheme.
• Neighborhood Cats is pleased with its design for Tomahawk's Feral Cat Trap.
• There is the sweetly-named, local, Jamaica Plain HubCats, though this site hasn't been updated since March 2008.
• Here is STOP Clinic (Stop the Overpopulation of Pets), operated out of Weymouth.
• And finally, there is the inevitable Wikipedia article on feral cats. 

Oh, and one more thing:  It seems mother cat has her own trap 'n' kill program, for skin and bones laid out just a few cat steps from the nursing cat are all that remain of one of the resident squirrels.

Make that trap 'n' kill 'n' eat.

Two days later, the bones are gone and only the pelt remains.