Congratulations to Tom Pepper who won a free outdoor shelter for their colony cats and a bottle of Feral Flower Essence from FixNation board member Jackson Galaxy’s Spirit Essences line through FixNation’s National Feral Cat Day story competition!
My name is Tom and I am not a cat person. I live with my elderly parents who are cat people. But for the last 50 years, they will not go out and get themselves a cat. But they will feed strays until the cows come home. Enter tortoise colored female cat named GPS (name to be explained later), and her single male kitten ‘tiger stripe’. Our residential back yard has no dogs and has become a safe haven for stray domesticated and/or feral cats. My dad starting feeding these feral cats, and they seemed to be happy to eat the food he would put out for them. You could not get within 20 ft. of them, unless it was feeding time where the female would charge the food bowl, hissing and swatting the air in an attempt to claim the food just in case my dad didn’t drop the bowl fast enough and back away. I told my dad, ‘this feral female is fertile and there will be more next year unless you stop feeding them or we do ‘something’. I had no idea what ‘something’ would turn out to be the case.
Six months later, the female known as ‘GPS mom’ shows up with a new kitten, same coloring as mom. So the juvenile tiger striped male, GPS mom and its new tortoise colored kitten named ‘two face’ (since the kittens face, while all tortoise colored, had a distinctive vertical line which gave the appearance of two faces) all now live in our back yard.
Six months later, my sister arrived for a visit. She is most definitely a cat person, found out that we had a start of a cat colony. Pretty much read my father the ‘riot act’ about ‘if you feed them, you must fix them’ rule. Which triggered my unwanted volunteering, and becoming the person who gets to trap the feral cats and getting them to FixNation.
One month later, after getting some loaner cat traps, I was able to capture both females, and took them to FixNation. Upon arrival I was told that one of the cats had given birth to a kitten while in the cage, while I drove it to FixNation! And that the other female showed signs of just given birth to kittens a few days before. The oldest female cat was fitted with a radio collar with hopes of finding her kitten cache, hence the name ‘GPS mom’, since she now had a radio collar. The younger female that had one kitten in transit to FixNation was given to a volunteer and gave birth to 5 more kittens the next day.
6 weeks later we caught sight of GPS mom with four kittens. I set traps and caught all the kittens but by now the GPS mom was wary of the traps and she remained on the loose. Once the kittens were trapped I then found out that they could not get fixed until they were older or were at least 2 lbs. So now I have 4 kittens that had to be kept indoors and taken care of until they grew, lovely. My elderly Mother insisted that the kittens were to be kept in the house, and in the front room where she sits most of the day.
In the end, all kittens were fixed, some found homes and our four kittens remained feral yet seem to be happy living in our back yard.
The folks at FixNation were quite helpful, fixing two older females, at least 9 kittens, and two roving males that happened to find their way into the traps. All the cats that drop by for a meal these days seem healthy and happy. They just don’t like people, which is fine with me. While I’m still not a cat person, I was happy to help get them all fixed up.
The lessons learned are ‘if you feed them, you must fix them’ and that one female cat can turn into many, many kittens in less than a year, so trap and fix as soon as possible. Do it today.
