Shelter me!

Sunday, April 5, 2009

I took a walk around the neighborhood yesterday. I felt that if I knocked on a sufficient number of doors, someone would be able to tell me where feral cats hang out in the neighborhood and who feeds them. It didn’t take more than 30 minutes to identify the center of the scene, even though only one neighbor actually opened their door. They were the only people I needed to meet; they gently pointed out a house that had seen better days and told me that the people who lived there had a lot of cats.

I went over to the house, knocked on the front door and hung around for five or six minutes but nobody came out. The windows had paper taped on them. Maybe the people could not afford curtains; maybe they were old and couldn’t easily come to the door. I thought I smelled cats. The yard was overgrown; it looked like a place that cats would like. There was plenty of room for animals to hide. When I walked away, I had a feeling that whoever lived there would probably not be interested in talking to me about anything, much less helping them trap and spay/neuter their cats.

If this was home for the wild cat that was temporarily living on my porch, that was probably a good thing, at least from the cat’s point of view. Aside from the endometrial infection that the cat had  (due to birthing kittens) she was in pretty darn good shape for a 1-year-old feral cat.

I still felt as though I could extend a helping hand to people in Medford who needed help managing stray cats.  But it had to be a partnership effort. I had five more days to think about how to get that going before I could release the wild cat.