The feral cat on my porch, Medford, MA
Wednesday, April 1
The grey cat has been in the acclimation cage on my porch for seven days as of today. She has quite a few days left on her antibiotic regimen. So, I was relieved to discover that she didn’t trash her cage last night. For the last two days, the food bowl has been knocked off the shelf; the litter box has been kicked around and her water bowl is under her bed. None of that today. It may be that she appreciates the food. Hard to say. She still won’t blink her eyes when she looks at me. I may be the feeder but I make her really nervous.
She is too wild to ever be a house-cat but she appears to have had a fairly good life somewhere close-by because she looked well-fed before I started giving her tuna and sardines (with her antibiotics). For the first couple days I had her, I entertained the idea of placing her in a barn. But I don’t like to place single cats in barns. In our barn cat program, the most luck I have had is with bonded pairs. My friend Cindy of Charles River Alley Cats helped nix the idea of relocating her.
Cindy and several others believe that there is never just one stray cat; where there is one, there is a colony nearby. The latest plan is to let her go but if I would like to find out who is caring for her, if only to release her in the right place.
I took a picture of her yesterday and made signs to post around the neighborhood.I didn’t have a stapler and was going to make due with push pins, not very sound from an ecological standpoint. Then I decided to ask shop owners on Main Street to put up my sign and offer them double-sided scotch tape as a fail-safe, so to speak.
I got lucky on my first stop, Bella Ravioli. I love their food, and so does everybody else in Medford, so it makes sense that the fellow who owns the place would know what that is happening in the neighborhood around him. Still, I was amazed at his response when I asked him if he knew anything about stray cats in the neighborhood:
“Yeah, there is a group of gray cats around here. Nobody owns them. They are stray and wild. There is a mother cat about a year old. She is a good looking cat, had kittens about 10 weeks ago.”
That was my cat.
Sandy on April 1st 2009