Changes, Part 3

Now that I intend to move from my apartment to another location in town, I worry about the outsider cats I will be leaving behind. I have long toyed with the idea of bringing them with me if I ever moved. Now that day is actually approaching, and I have decided to try to bring Sable, Arliss and, maybe, Cicero, with me.

This won’t be easy. None of them appears regularly, and all are quite timid, and therefore won’t be easy to trap. I can’t guarantee that I will see any of them between now and the time I leave. My advantage is that I have a little more time than the two weeks over-lap when I will have both my new and old home at my disposal: a friend in the rescue-group will be able to hold one of the cats at her place in a large kennel, and hopefully have her or him used to a carrier (Kept in the larger kennel) enough by the time I move that the cat can then be transferred to my new home. That will allow me to trap at least one as early as the first week in October.

Sable has been coming to the Cosy Apartment for food since I moved there, at the end of 2015. She initially came with her sister, Sablette, who has since disappeared. I don’t want the same to happen to Sable, who is probably about fourteen or fifteen, an impressive age for an outsider-cat. (She is a survivor of a feral colony, the members of which were trapped and fixed some years before I arrived in the neighbourhood.) I worry about her most of all, as she is old and, so far as I know, has never lived indoors.

Her friend, Arliss, white and orange, I see less often. He and Sable are compatible and, probably, could live together in the same room while they are socialised. I have no basis for thinking so, but I believe that he could grow accustomed to humans enough to be adoptable. I don’t think he has a home; he alternately shows up looking well-groomed and scruffy, so I am unsure of his status - though he has been coming to a neighbour’s food-bowl for quite a while. I think he is unneutered.

Cicero is black and white, and, I think, the most likely to be socialised to the point of adoption. He always looks well-fed, but his feet are dirty. My attempts to discover if he has a home - via posters put up around the area - have produced no results.

Each of these cats have, I am certain, other sources of food; I am sure they have shelters somewhere. If they are owned, I will probably find advertisements about them going missing, if I am able to trap them. But I think that, while they may be fed elsewhere, and may be provided with shelter, they are homeless.

I can’t guarantee that keeping them indoors will work. I believe, as I wrote, that Arliss and Cicero could be fully socialised over time. Sable will always retain some of her feral ways, but I want to bring her indoors because of her age; she surely must be approaching the expiry date for an outsider-cat, even one assured of a food-source - which surety may vanish when I move.

These are my plans. They may all come a cropper; they may succeed only partially; I may run out of time to help one, two or all of them. But I would feel as if I were abandoning them, if I didn’t try.