Not sure how that last one slipped in there, but what the heck.
Got this old beat up stray black Tom that lives under my porch. His name is Hobo and I feed him, don't tell City of Garland. I am going to try to trap him Monday and take him to the vet for some shots and attention. He is pretty beat up, there are a lot of Toms in this neck of the woods. I like him but he is very skittish. I'll only get one shot with my trap.
Wish me luck cat lovers.
Keep us posted on the saga of Hobo and life under the porch! Let’s hope it’s a continuing saga.
I use to guard a school overnight in the middle of nowhere. There was a big orange cat that would come in from the dessert occasionally. He did not let me near him at first. I would usually snack on fried chicken while I was there so I started leaving him a piece when I first saw him for the night. After awhile it got to the point where he didn’t care about the chicken so much he just wanted to sit in my lap for hours. Sure beats worrying about coyotes trying to eat you I figured.
Before you do that, hear this:
My ex-wife had a similar kind of cat, Marmalade, who was feral but would spend time with her. She took it to the vets for some medical attention, and when they brought it out, they brought out a dead Marmalade. As you can imagine, she was distraught with guilt.......
Thanks for the laughs!
BTW, does anyone know why Drudgereport is down? Has he been hacked?
Is it just me, or does that first photo look like Finn The Human?
Hey, Chuck - wish you all kinds of luck trapping Hobo. I have a whole brood in my backyard thanks to a very beatup ol’ black tomcat that I dubbed “Mickey Rourke”(the ol’ beatup Rourke not the 9-1/2 wks dude). He hits, he runs, and then a few months later, more black kittens in my backyard. Can’t trap the BabyMama either (they’re an elusive couple). Did manage to trap her babies so thank the Lord for that.
Had a big old tomcat show up in our back yard years ago. Not a feral cat, as he was friendly enough. I suspect someone moved away and just left him behind. I resisted giving him anything to eat, hoping he’d go away, but you could just see him getting skinnier by the day, so we finally broke down and started feeding him. Even though he was a big-old boy, he still managed to get the worst of a couple of cat fights, and after a few trips to the vet to get his wounds treated, we decided he needed to be fixed, so that was it. He belonged to us now. He was the only cat we’ve ever had that was allowed to go in and out of the house as he pleased. It turned out that he had scoliosis, and if he were left out at night in the cold weather, he’d be laid-up nearly criple for a week, so we always had to try and go out and find him before bedtime and bring him in if it was going to be cold outside. He really turned out to be a lovable old guy and was a lot of fun to have around. He really didn’t care too much for our other cats, but he did have a habit of greeting our little black female cat by licking her on the top of the head sometimes when he would come inside and she would start sniffing him.
We just trapped six feral cats in a row and had them fixed, got their shots, and rereleased them. About three of them stuck around and seem to be “ours” now although of course we can’t actually touch them. ;o)
The feral rescue place that helped us out with all this told us that after we took them home from their office, we should leave them in the trap (they just used the trap as a carrier, basically) and put them in a quiet, protected place overnight (like maybe your garage) with a loose cover over them. This was so that the anesthetic could leave their bodies completely, so they wouldn’t be woozy and at the mercy of a predator or car. So we did as they told us, dropped some dry food into the carrier (it always disappeared) and released them in the morning after a good night’s rest. (The cover over the cage was so they would chill out instead of freaking out all night.) Seemed to work well.
Had one funny incident: The scardiest cat of all (I started calling her Moby Dick, since we could NOT catch that cat for the longest time) did just fine with being fixed, etc. But the next morning when I released her, she STREAKED about 300 feet, up and over our 6’ back fence, and kept going! LOL! I thought she was headed for Mexico and we’d never see her again! But a couple of days later she turned up again, and still hangs around. They *know* where the food comes from.
Good luck with your little hobo friend!! Hope the vet can help him out.
My kitty and.I will be thinking of Hobo all day.
I hope he can live happily ever after with his new. Human.
feral cats have it rough.
I've only ever taken in one stray cat, but interestingly enough I didn't need a trap to do it. When we moved into our current home in 2009 there was a tortoiseshell cat living in our yard. For quite a while she would only give my wife or me a quick glance before streaking off, and she was just skin and bones unless she was pregnant. She had three litters of kittens in our back yard that I know of, and with the second one I started putting out a little food for her. After only two days of doing this, I would look out the window of the spare bedroom and find her sitting by the plate waiting to be fed. She would, of course, disappear when I came out to put food on the plate.
She slowly became less afraid of us, although not exactly friendly. I can remember a couple occasions where I was doing something in the back yard where she came up to within a few feet (still out of arm's reach, though) and sat and watched me. With litter number "three" (of the ones I knew of) I decided to get a little more serious about the feeding program. We didn't think we'd get mama cat socialized, but we figured we could socialize her kittens and find them homes. Boy, were we wrong!
Mama cat eventually became bold enough that if my wife left the front door open while our house cat was outside, she would sneak in and eat Apple's food. One day my wife came home from the supermarket and found her sleeping on our bed; apparently she had slipped in unnoticed and had been in the house the whole time. And by this time she had already gotten friendly enough to let us pet her.
When we finally took her in, she was pregnant yet again. She had her litter in the master bedroom closet and we had her spayed once the kittens were weaned. We kept one of the kittens and gave the other three to friends.
And here she is today. She isn't skin and bones anymore! Not to mention she's decided she's a lap kitty. We named her Patch.
