Hello! My newest episode is going live tomorrow at 9am. You can find it here or wherever you listen to podcasts!
This week I am sharing another one of my farm stories! Specifically, how my neighbours and I worked together to humanely reduce our stray/feral cat population. Teamwork is the dreamwork!
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Real quick, before I dive into my kitty tales, I wanted to give an update on my fierce little hen, Boo. In my last episode, I mentioned that things weren’t looking good, and that my husband and I were going to try and drain the fluid in her abdomen to make her more comfortable. After assessing her, my husband decided that this was not the right action to take as we could feel that it wasn’t just fluid that was causing the swelling, and we didn’t want to risk puncturing an organ or tumour. So on February 21st, I took her to my avian vet to be humanely euthanized. I brought her body home and immediately performed a necropsy. What I saw was absolutely shocking: a good 80% of her body cavity was filled with material due to egg peritonitis. It completed packed her reproductive tract and she’d started laying internally. Her organs had almost no room and were very constricted. It’s the worst case I have ever seen and I am truly shocked that she lasted as long as she did. Letting her go was the kindest thing we could have done! RIP Boo. You were a force.
If you're interested in seeing the material that I removed from Boo during the necropsy, I will post a photo at the very end of this post (so people can avoid it, if it would be too upsetting).
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With that bummer out of the way, on to a happier topic!
Now, if I told you that I loved cats, you probably wouldn’t be surprised. At this point, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that I love pretty much every living thing from dogs to reptiles to amphibians to bees to rescuing earthworms off the pavement! Inside this tepid British exterior is a gooey marshmallow heart.
So, yes, I love cats but I don’t own any, primarily because my husband is extremely allergic to them. Due to this, we’ve also fallen into taking dogs who are not cat safe, or generally have a high prey drive and need a home without small, fuzzy things. This was actually a huge boon to our rescue group when we fostered greyhounds as they occasionally needed homes without small mammals or small children. If one of those pups came in, they’d give us a call and we’d happily foster them. These kind of dogs usually take longer to place because many people have cats or bunnies or tiny humans of their own.
And that’s how we ended up with our current pups! Kaylee was cat tested as a ‘maybe’ so the adoption group preferred a home with no cats; Chappie has a crazy high prey drive and wasn’t safe to even test (at the time), and Luna actually killed a cat in her previous home despite having literally grown up with them (she was born at that house, knew the cat all her life, but something happened when their people were away). Understandably, they didn’t want to risk their other cats and so she came here, where she is a spoiled princess and has zero access to small mammals (other than squirrels and chipmunks!).
But my love of kitties means that I have paid attention to the ones in our neighbourhood. I quickly learned that the extremely friendly orange cat, who is a big talker, belonged to one of my closest neighbours. He was originally abandoned by someone else on our street and my neighbour took him in. Well, kind of. She took him to the vet to be neutered and get his shots, and they sadly learned he has FIV. So he doesn’t live inside with her other cats, instead she has a shelter set up for him with food and litter in her garage. This arrangement works well for him because he was used to roaming at that point and didn’t like to be confined. His name is ‘Minnie’ because his previous owner thought he was a girl kitten.
Anyway, I once watched Minnie chase a black and white cat up into a tree. He then sat at the base so said cat couldn’t come down. I kept an eye on them and it was over an hour before Minnie got bored and wandered away, allowing the treed cat to descend. Minnie is a force!
This black and white cat turned out to be an intact male, which is probably why Minnie hates him so much.
I think it was winter 2021 when I encountered some absolutely adorable kittens by my barn. They were gorgeous wee things! All of them were grey and white with blue eyes; two long haired, one short. They were wary of me but didn’t seem completely feral. With them was a black cat with bright yellow eyes, who I originally assumed was also a kitten due to her small size. After a while, however, I realised this was their mother, and she was just extremely young herself.
I started putting food out for these kittens, as well as making some makeshift shelters for them. They usually hung around just long enough to eat and then wandered off, although sometimes I found them sleeping together in an abandoned nest box I had left next to the barn. I did try and get them used to me but could never get closer than 5ft before they spooked and ran away.
After just a few weeks, they stopped showing up and I hoped they had just moved on and hadn’t fallen victim to predators or the nearby main road.
Then last year, I saw a little black cat again. And she looked extremely pregnant. I started mentioning her to my neighbours and found that I was far behind on the local kitty gossip! Apparently, the black kitten mama that I had first met had been taken in by a neighbour on a nearby road. She managed to catch her and the kittens! The kittens adjusted well to indoor life and were all adopted but mama was too feral. Instead, she was spayed, vaccinated, and returned to her familiar territory with a notched ear (the universal sign that a cat has been spayed or neutered before re-release).
This current pregnant mama was a new kitty to the area, and two of my neighbours were already putting feeding stations out for her. Eventually, they were able to capture her and the kittens! I offered to help cover expenses on getting them all fixed but never heard back. I believe mama and kittens were all placed into foster homes and eventually adopted.
Unknown to me, my neighbours have been working for a while to spay/neuter the stray cats in our area. Recently, those numbers have been increasing. It’s a mix of people dumping their cats when they don’t want them anymore (usually once they’re no longer adorable kittens), and the established intact strays hanging around ready to knock them up.
Thankfully, we were able to identify the daddy: the black and white long haired male! In fact, after asking around, we learned that this cat (who I will call Tom Kitty) had been hanging around our road for over seven years!! He had originally belonged to someone who moved house and decided not to take him. They just dumped him outside and abandoned him! So he’s been guarding this as his territory and knocking up any intact female he can find since then.
Clearly, we had to capture Tom Kitty so we could get him neutered. It seemed like it might be easy at first as he is very affectionate and definitely not afraid of people. However, every time someone tried to scoop him up, he would fight them. He was also smart enough not to fall for traps. No matter what kind of delicious treat you put in them, he knew to avoid them.
Learning this, I started to befriend Tom Kitty. I’d put food out whenever I saw him and would pet him while he ate. He would be purring up a storm! One day, I just looked at him and thought “fudge it”, and then I scooped him up before he knew what was happening!!
It was a bit of an awkward hold. I didn’t want to be scratched so I had his paws facing away from me. He had his nails out but wasn’t struggling or trying to get me. He did complain quite a lot, however! But I marched us into the garage where I had a crate waiting, and popped him inside. He was not happy about this situation but we had him!
I couldn't keep him in the garage because even that is too close for my husband and would cause him great physical misery so I reached out to my neighbour who had been trying to capture this cat for months (let’s call her J). J was delighted that I had managed to contain Tom Kitty, and we transferred him to a larger crate in her garage where she could put a litter box in for him, as well as food and water. The nights were quite cold and her garage is unheated so we covered most of the crate with blankets, and she later set up a portable heater for him.
Within 24 hours of his capture, we booked his neuter!
J had connected with a wonderful local vet clinic that had a TNR (trap, neuter, return) program: Alter Clinic Animal Care in Canton, Ohio.
This is a fully grant funded program that allows them to help tackle the stray and feral cat population in our county. J had reached out to them when she caught two kittens earlier in the year. They were able to neuter both boys and vaccinate them for $38 each! And the best part of the program? The cats stay at the clinic overnight for after care. Many clinics that are able to financially offer this kind of program don’t have the space to house the cats overnight, which means whoever brought the cat in must do so. This can limit how many people volunteer to assist the TNR program due to an inability or reluctance to keep a feral cat in their home overnight.
This clinic, though, includes the overnight care! You just bring the cat to them in an appropriately sized crate (size clearly marked on their website) and then pick them up the next day! And even better for us, they were offering the TNR procedure for free in the month of December, which is when we caught Tom Kitty!
J handled transporting him to and from the clinic, and also organized his release. I took the clinic’s wishlist with me when shopping and got them as many supplies as I could as a thank you (they don’t have a donation button on their website so this seemed the best way to thank them). Since it was almost Christmas, I also made sure to grab some chocolates and cookies for the clinic staff too. Dropping that all off was a lot of fun! I’m considering making it a yearly donation because they’re doing so much good in our community.
ETA: After writing and recording this episode, I noticed that the clinic now has a donate button!! You can call and pay my card over the phone, or donate via Paypal. Click here for more info.
I’ve seen Tom Kitty only twice since his adventure. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t trust me anymore! He is hesitant to let me pet him but he will acquiesce if I give him the wet food he likes. His primary territory seems to be mostly on the other side of the street so I think he just isn’t detouring to see me anymore since it led to his capture. I don’t blame him!
Instead, black kitty mama #1 (who had the grey and white kittens in winter 2021) has returned to my property. I noticed she was hanging around my barn, where she used to bring her kittens, and I started putting food out for her. Now, she is a regular fixture! She has filled out nicely and has a lovely shiny coat! I see everyday that isn’t wet or snowing. I’ve started buying cat food on the regular to keep her well fed, and she starts calling to me when she sees me because she knows food is on the way.
Kitty Friend (as I’ve been calling her) has always been extremely wary of people. We have reached a point now where she trusts me enough to start eating as I’m dishing out the food, and she’ll even follow me to the bee hives and hang out on nice days. I can also pet her once or twice while she eats but that’s all she will allow. I am hoping to continue desensitizing her to being touched since I would like to be able to take her to the vet should she ever need it. That seems very far away at this point. The important thing is that she knows she can come here for plenty of food and fresh water, and I have a beautiful Kitty Friend to spend time with.
I hope you enjoyed this farm story! My next episode will cover the topic of frostbite in chickens; what causes it, how we can prevent it, and what can be done to treat it.
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And now, scroll down for the photo of the material (egg peritonitis) I removed from Boo.
