One of the challenges of owning indoor-only cats is that
they don’t always get with the program. They dart out of open doors, find ways
to squirm through gates and partly-opened windows, and so forth. We humans have
yet to find the means to explain to them why they must stay on one side of the
door when there are so many intoxicating smells and things to chase on the
other side.
In our neighborhood, there are all the usual reasons for
keeping cats indoors, plus a few local ones. Predators (mountain lions,
coyotes, bobcats, plus critters who can take on a cat and come out on top, like
raccoons), diseases, ticks, fleas, cars. Things that cats are predators for:
songbirds and helpful garden reptiles, to mention a few.
In our household, the situation is complicated by having a
retired seeing eye dog who has been
trained to open doors. She can’t managed round knobs, but latches are no
problem, nor are sliding screens.
Here are our two cats, Shakir and Gayatri. Despite having
one eye, Gayatri is a fearsome hunter. If we acceded to her wishes, she would
present us with a snake or lizard every single day. Since this would mean
disaster for our garden ecology, we keep her in jail. She gets out
occasionally, which is why we use flea/tick/heartworm prevention on her, and
she always comes back a few hours later, irate that we have not let her in right now.
Shakir, on the other hand, would sniff at a screen door and
then slink away to a cozy basket. We always believed that of the two cats, he
was the stay-at-home. Until one day, we discovered that Tajji, our
afore-mentioned door artiste, had managed to open the sliding screen door. We
did not realize this until some hours after the fact.
“Where’s Gayatri? Oh, thank goodness, she’s here, napping.”
And we did not think to look for Shakir until the next
morning, when he failed to demand his breakfast.
Panic ensued, followed by a
search of the property, unprintable words about all the hiding places, visits
to the neighbors, calls to the vet, postings on Nextdoor, and putting up flyers
and posters within a several block radius.
All of this was to no avail, however, and I watched my
emotional state go from I WANT HIM BACK
NOW to noticing all the absences in our lives and the beginnings of grief.
Then, 2 days later, while walking past that same screen door, I heard a meow. I
dashed outside, just in time to see him scurrying into the hedge maze. I
tracked him to the back fence, where he freaked out at the sight of me trying
to soothe and entice him.
Sightings over the next few days confirmed that he was still
in the yard, which is enclosed by 6 foot high chain link, mostly to protect the
garden from the deer (AKA rats on stilts) but also to ensure a safe enclosure
for the dog. Apparently, the combination of the difficulty of scaling or
digging under the fence, plus the food that we began leaving out every night,
persuaded Shakir to stay close.
But how to really get him back? After research and consultation,
and in view of how quickly he had gone feral, we resigned ourselves to having
to trap him. Dave borrowed a raccoon-sized HaveAHeart trap from a neighbor and
set up it near where we had left food. The trap worked. But it didn’t catch
Shakir… it caught a raccoon.
A very, very unhappy raccoon. Which had bloodied its paws
trying to escape and torn up a corner of the house in the process.
We’re not allowed by law to relocate wildlife; it’s kill it
or release it. Dave took the trap to the other side of the property and opened
it. The raccoon took off at maximum turbo-charged speed. We very much doubt it
will be back anytime soon.
Back to leaving food out every night, then slowly
introducing the pressure-spray-cleaned trap at a distance, then moving the two
closer and closer. Because Shakir has gotten so skittish and runs whenever he
sees a person through the windows, we have not tried to spot him. So we’re not
entirely sure that whatever is chowing down on that can of Fancy Feast every
night is indeed our cat. Could be the raccoon, although the dog would have let
us know. Could be a skunk. Could be another neighbor’s cat. We’ll find out
soon.
We are now at the stage where the food has been eaten when
left just inside the door of the trap, which has been locked open. Tonight, we’ll
leave food at the back of the trap. If that’s eaten, then the trap gets set.
We’ve done a little thinking about what to do if we do catch
Shakir. We have to assume he’ll be feral and we’ll have to tame him all over
again. We don’t really have a room to lock him in, other than my office. And he
may be crawling with fleas because it’s been warm, a raccoon has been in the
yard, and he didn’t have flea/tick/heartworm prevention. But one thing at a
time, as they say.
And here is the last photo of Shakir, cuddled up to his
jailbreak buddy, Tajji.
Stay tuned…
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