Wednesday, September 30, 2009

"Cat Eyes" and Three Down! (Two to go, I think)

I have been reading the blog of "Strayer," a woman in Oregon, I believe, who traps and sterilizes cats by the hundreds. Her site: http://catwomanflix.blogspot.com/. (Blog is called "Cat Eyes") It's truly amazing, the work she completes. I don't know how she has the emotional strength to continue as she does. Just reading her posts are often heartbreaking.

In one of her posts, she mentioned that she had told a woman a certain way of doing things, including lining the trap with newspaper. I wasn't sure if it helped with trapping the cats or was for their comfort while in the trap, but I decided to try it tonight. It seemed to me that the paper might help the cats to *not* distinguish between the floor and the trip plate. (They had kept stepping over the plate to get to the food and were not getting caught.)

I went over tonight and set the trap around 4 PM. At 6, no one was trapped, but the food was gone, of course. So I got out the paper, lined the trap, and when I came back, trapped cat! I noticed it was a tabby, so I made sure it was not the one we caught previously. It was the tabby and white cat, though, so I covered her up, and brought her over to the animal hospital. (Mrs. L had just finished telling me that the tabby and white cat has been missing, may have been the dead cat in the road. Could be a different one, of course, but here he/she is!)

After dropping the cat off at the hospital, I went back to Wendy's to meet Mrs. L. She had gone over to trap the black cat. She's the smart one, that little black kitty. Fortunately, Mrs. L can pet her a little, so she picked her up quickly and stuck her in a carrier. And then I took her over. So, three down, two to go! And a black kitten, I guess. I want no more kittens! Where did this little black kitten come from?

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for the mention! Covering the trap, while trapping, can also help, leaving both ends, like a tunnel, open. This also helps a great deal if you are trapping multiple cats. If a cat sees another in a trap, especially an uncovered trap, it can make it more difficult to trap the remaining colony cats. Sounds like you are doing a great job and I love to see younger people doing such things. In Oregon here, sometimes at FCCO clinics, we oldies will lament "what will happen when all the old cat trappers die?"

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