The Cat Who Came Early for Dinner

I suspected that after what I hoped was the last of the kittens were trapped in Operation Slim Pickens capturing the remaining adults would be difficult. Incredibly, three times we were able to trap a couple of cats on the same day. This rather spoiled me, I think, though I nevertheless was anticipating more hapless cats looking at me through a wire mesh. For most of this week, however, the results were nil.

Monday night saw a dish of sardines used as bait emptied, but the trap not sprung. I thought it odd that a cat could be so light in weight as not to trigger the trap. After all, kittens had set it off. The next evening, though, a colleague of mine, working late, and who volunteered to check on the traps for me through the evening, solved this mystery. He saw a cat, evidently wary of the trap itself, reach through bars and picked out the pieces of fish. I wasn’t sure who this cat was, but it was small and slender – possibly the elusive Beulah.

Thursday, I prepared the cages differently. Before leaving work at about four o’clock in the afternoon, I wrapped the rear of each in a blanket, rendering theft of the food from without impossible (I hoped). Whether the original cat-burglar re-considered a direct approach, or it was a different animal all together, I received a telephone call even before I had ridden home. This fellow was in one of the traps. He couldn’t wait for the evening, and thought the sardines in the cage an easy and early dinner.

Meet Auvergne.

The moustache made me think he may be part French, and Auvergne could equally, in theory, be applied to a feline of either gender. In any case, he spent the night very quietly at my apartment before going to the veterinary hospital the next morning.

Auvergne is a youngster, only about a year old. I was melancholy at the thought of such a youthful cat spending his life in a feral colony – though seeing an old one do it is no easier. But Auvergne likely knew no indoor life, and so, unlike Raleigh, did not long for a lost paradise. More positively, he had no trace of FIV or leukemia. Nor had he any ear-mites. He was vaccinated by the doctor and neutered.

When we collected him for his release, he had burrowed under the blanket placed in his carrier, but was sitting up.

When he smelled the fresh air, and probably the familiar scents of his stamping grounds, he peered out. Food placed for his delectation untouched, he ran out of the carrier a moment after it was opened. Neutered, he may stay out of fights and live a reasonably long time as an outsider-cat, making no more outsider-cats in his turn.

I know of at least three more adult cats I would like to see inside a trap, so the operation will continue next week, hopefully with similar results.