The Feral Cat

Revised from my book on Amazon Kindle, Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady, chapters 10-11

Arbee, 1999

After my cat Yoda died, my boyfriend Bobby and I settled in for our second year together in a cramped apartment. The household divided into camps, me and them. His cats, Red and Merly, responded only to him and they had their own secret language. If we broke up, they’d go with him and I’d be alone.

I suspected he was thinking of leaving, having found evidence he might be seeing someone else or at least thinking about it, so my subliminal need for my own cat became more intense. I had recently interviewed for a couple of jobs that would have dramatically and positively changed my life, and didn’t get either one, so that was pushing me, too. I needed to do something. I needed something of my own.

All that negative energy came to a resolution on a bright, cold Martin Luther King Day in 1999. We were sitting at an Arby’s in the middle of the afternoon when Bobby spotted a little white cat out in the parking lot brushing up against our car for the engine heat. Without any encouragement from me, he ran out to get it. I took care of the trays, got his coat and went to see how it was going. The cat was in the cactus landscaping by the door. We tried to smoke her out by coming at her from two directions, but she darted into the parking lot and took refuge under a car.

A small audience gathered to watch the chase and told us the cat had been at the restaurant for weeks, including during a recent devastating Christmas Eve ice storm that had shut down the city, and no one had been able to catch it. A cat who might be the mother was run over on the highway in front of the restaurant. And one woman volunteered that the cat was a rare short-legged breed called a Munchkin.

We gave up trying to catch her, but not before I made eye contact with the little white kitten with black markings on her head that looked like a hat. “You are my destiny,” the cat seemed to say to me. “If you can catch me.”

I stopped at the Arby’s every day after work to see her. I’d buy her a roast beef sandwich and try to
 grab her, but she continued to elude me. One day I waded into the cactus landscaping, trying to catch her, and got covered in cactus needles. My legs looked like a porcupine and I ouched all the way home. Bobby had to pull them out with tweezers.

More determined than ever, I called the local Animal Adoption Rescue Foundation, as well as a friend named Julie Farnsworth who had a successful record of collecting stray dogs off highways. 

Julie headed out with her squirrel trap and spotted the cat immediately, panhandling customers for roast beef. No one could touch her, but she let everyone know she was there and ready to accept their leftovers. She entered Julie’s baited trap three times, but each time she was able to grab the food and get out without triggering the door. The kitchen staff at Arby’s told Julie they had successfully caught her earlier that day but she got away during the transfer to another cage.

Kate, the local animal rescue league lady, came out the next night and set up her trap and caught a cat, but it was a different one, possibly a litter mate since this cat also had black and white coloring. Kate’s plan was to have the one she captured fixed and then released back in the same place and advised me to do the same should either one of us catch my cat. It was the best way to handle feral cats, she said. They never make good pets because you can’t handle them and if they get outside, they try to make a run for it back to the colony and get killed on the highway.

It turned out the cat she trapped and named Rebecca could be handled, though, and Kate kept her. Encouraged that there might be other kittens that could still be domesticated, she kept returning to the Arby’s with her cages. There was a thriving colony of  probably a hundred cats traveling in the storm drains behind the fast food restaurants. In the weeks immediately after my cat was captured and we stopped calling each other, she trapped four adult cats, neutered and returned them and was working on the other 96.

Arbee outside her first home 

My cat had decided her best chance was not with the colony but in the cactus garden outside the Arby’s. We continued to dissuade her of that career plan. Julie went out again, this time with a raccoon cage and fishing line to trigger the door herself and caught her. The cat wasn’t a Munchkin. She just chronically spent her life in a crouch, ready to spring away.

The manager at Arby’s had given me a list of phone numbers of people who had volunteered to adopt this cat if it was captured, and I talked to a few of them. None of them had plans to get her fixed or even keep her indoors. All they were really offering was to transport her from Arby’s parking lot to their neighborhood or backyard. Kate had warned me that there was no point trying to find homes for ferals, even when there were offers. So many people just aren’t very good pet keepers. They don’t get them fixed. They let them roam, and when they move, or the cat becomes pregnant, sick, or just not cute anymore, they abandon them.

Extreme cat rescuers, I would discover, have very particular standards for cats and they don’t compromise. Like me, they end up with a house full of foster cats because it’s so emotionally difficult to let the rescued cat go to a home that isn’t, in their estimation, ideal. And ferals are not the ideal pet, but I was sticking to the pact we made, eye to eye, in the cactus garden.

On the Internet, I learned one unfixed female can produce two or more litters per year. Even with their shorter lifespan, one feral cat can be responsible for 420,000 descendents. That’s a lot of cats. The Feral Cat Coalition supports trapping, neutering, and releasing ferals as the best method of stabilizing a colony, but it requires the dedicated services of volunteer trappers, vets and colony feeders.

One of these groups kept a record of their colony project over three years. They started with 44 cats and in the month it took to capture and neuter all of them, three were found dead. One cat had to be euthanized because of its health, so 40 neutered cats were released back into the colony, 24 males and 16 females. The females that were fixed were already pregnant with 32 kittens.

Three years later, 30 of them were still alive, joined by six new cats, so even with neutering, the colony was only reduced by four in three years, including the additions. But without neutering, the 16 females could have easily produced 100 kittens a year, or 300 more cats during the three years of the study. And those 300 would have been producing hundreds more.

 I named my fast-food cat Arbee and Julie and I estimated she was four to six months old. She was quiet on the drive home. Red and Merly screeched loudly and ran for cover when I carried the cage through the door, even though Arbee had not said a word to announce her arrival. They must have sensed a feral cat before I even got the key in the door. They never did that again with any of the other additions to the cat family, so that was strange.

For the next few days, Arbee crouched quietly in the cage. Red and Merly wisely decided to ignore her. I continued to stop at Arby’s every day after work and bought her a roast beef sandwich. She adjusted to using a litter box in the cage immediately, so on the second day I needed to change the sand. I brought the cage into the bathroom, closed the door, and opened the cage. Arbee had been so calm all this time, I thought it would be fine.

All hell broke loose.

Arbee leaped up on the shelves above the toilet and knocked everything off them, jumped into the sink and knocked everything off it, and nearly ripped the shower curtain off the rod. I grabbed her and held her like a baby over my shoulder, patting her back, and she was calm and still again and happy to get back into the cage. It was one of the very rare times I held her.

With all this going on, my relationship with Bobby seemed to get back on track as we both focused on figuring out how to live with Arbee. I was solving other problems in my life by getting another cat, not a good solution, but there it was.

Arbee, Part II

The next time I had to clean Arbee’s cage, I decided not to limit her to destroying the bathroom. I would do it in the more familiar living room. I opened the door and backed off. She came out and positioned herself in the room, and that was the end of her cage days. Red and Merly didn’t attack her. Merly even offered to play Turbo Scratcher with her, a game where they hit a ball on a circular track repeatedly. She took an interest in all the toys, but we still couldn’t touch her. She found a hiding place when she wanted to sleep, and the rest of the time she kept all humans at a wary distance.

One evening she was sitting in the middle of the living room doing a little humping dance and making mewing noises and Bobby said, “Uh oh, she’s in heat.”

You I can tolerate.

Getting her in a carrying case to go to the vet and get fixed was going to be a dilemma since I couldn't touch her, but Arbee decided to postpone that trip by disappearing. The next morning we couldn’t find her anywhere in the house. Then I noticed I had left a window open. We lived on the second floor and even Red, who loved to be outside, never jumped out the window. Did Arbee? She must have.

With sad hearts, we accepted that Kate had been right. You can’t domesticate a feral cat and Arbee was on her way back to the colony, even though it was on the other side of the river.

A week later, when Bobby was parking his truck, he saw her shoot across the street and disappear down the alley next to our apartment building. He followed and discovered an open grate that led into the crawl space under the building. She had been living under the building all week. We put food out.

The next evening when he came home, she was waiting by the front of the building for the evening’s hand-out. He ran upstairs, got a can of food, opened it in the foyer of our apartment building and hid behind the door. Anything to do with Arbee requires a great deal of patience because she is a very contemplative cat. She thinks about her options a long time. She takes a step forward, and then rethinks her options. Eventually she entered the foyer, went to the food and he closed the door behind her, expecting her to freak out. Instead, she intently kept eating. Bobby ran upstairs to tell me he had her in the stairwell and went looking for the cage.

Excited to see her again, I opened the door to peek down the stairs and there she was on the window sill in the hallway, looking right at me. I reached out, grabbed her and tossed her inside our apartment. She ran to our bedroom and got under the bed. We were happy to have her back.

The next day when Bobby went home for lunch, he called me at work. “Guess who’s sitting on my lap?”

She had voluntarily given him her trust. He could pet her, as long as he didn’t make any motions like he was going to pick her up. To the end of her life, 16 years later, she would get close to him only when she wanted. She particularly liked to help him remove his shoes by tugging on his shoelaces. She sat on my lap once, right after we moved to a rental house. I was so surprised, I didn’t move for two hours and had to watch Robert Downey Jr.  in “Chaplain” on TV even though I had seen it already.

Because she would now let Bobby get close, he was able to sneak up on her and get her in a carrier and to the vet to be fixed, which ended her butt bobbing and window jumping. Once back in the outside world, she had decided it wasn’t that great and she chose us instead.

We had another scare a year later when we moved to the rental house, which was surrounded by woods on three sides. The sun porch had louver windows and no screens. I cranked one pane open just a sliver, and she still managed to squeeze herself out and disappear. We searched and called to no avail and our only hope was that she would choose us again. We had only been in the house a few days and Bobby didn’t think she’d know how to get back to us.

But she did, showing up in the yard two days later. We cajoled and offered food and begged and prayed, and she took a few steps toward the door, stopped and thought about it for another 20 minutes, then took another step. After hours of drama, she finally chose us again.

That was the longest she’s ever been missing, but whenever she did escape into the yard, it always took hours to persuade her to come back inside. Sometimes I’d be up until 1 a.m., opening the door every 10 minutes, see her approach, get all the way to the steps, and then turn around and run back into the yard before she’d finally come in. The feral in her is always listening to and debating with the call of the wild.

The next time she was missing overnight, she had been with us for six years and disappeared from the house we had just purchased. Bobby feared she was lost for sure in this new neighborhood, but I was hopeful, even confidant, she would choose us again, and in the morning, I found her at the back door and she walked right in.

For the rest of her life, sometimes she would get out and it would be hours again trying to persuade her to come back in. Then she got to the point where she stayed in the backyard and would come in if no other cats were by the door, so we actually let her out when she wanted. She never took a liking to any of the 10 cats she lived with during her lifetime. In the last years, she was more tolerant and would eat near another one. The sunroom became her daytime hang-out and the living room sofa her evening spot. She had her rituals. She sat in the bathroom with my husband every morning as he got ready for the day, and she helped him take his shoes off at night when he got in bed. And that was her life.

She still liked an Arby's roast beef sandwich whenever we could bring her one. Raw catfish and people-quality tuna fish were also favorite treats. She hated riding in the car and was so frightened going to the vet, she would start gasping for air, so she seldom went. Her medical file is the thinnest. She only went to the vet 10 times in 16 years, including being fixed. She got her shots, and had an issue with licking herself bald in spots. She was so upset about going to the vet for that, I found an ointment online that worked.