Here, kitty kitty!

Mom and I now can add the title "Animal Rescuers" to our resumes. Earlier in the week Dave and I went to Mom's house to pick up some pine straw. When I opened Mom's shed, what did I see? A kitten! But I only saw her for a second before she vanished. So Dave and I set about searching the shed high and low for any sign of this kitten or others. To no avail. I called Mom, who was at work at the time, and she said she'd seen a grown cat coming and going from the shed which we now know was the mama kitty. After considering the repercussions of passiveness on our parts, we put our heads together and came up with a plan of action to capture all the kitties in the shed. Being that these cats are completely feral and we had no chance of them coming to us on their own we had to come up with some way to catch them. We decided that once we caught them we would take the kitties to one of the no-kill shelters in Columbia or if said shelters were not currently accepting any rescues we would have the kitties spayed/neutered and then bring them back to Cameron and release them.

Mom called Uncle Pell who has a "live" trap which he brought over the next day and set up for us. By the afternoon we had the mama kitty and one female kitten. Mom had seen 2 more kitties when she went in the shed, though, which meant our capture was not complete. I drove down to Mom's and we reset the trap and caught one more female kitten. The 3 kitties came back to my house and are set up in the carport until....well I'm not sure yet. Mom caught the third female kitten the next morning and someone has already adopted her.

Dave and I would love to have another kitten, but I'm not sure we're going to keep one of these. They are still pretty small, about 7 or 8 weeks old, but they are completely wild. I'm not sure that they will ever be good pets. And we can't bring any of them around Mom's kitties or mine since we don't know yet if they are positive for Feline leukemia or other contagious diseases. I did a little math on the reproductive possibilities of these 4 female cats and came up with an astonishing number of feral and reproductively sound felines to take over Cameron if we took no action. We simply could not in good faith sit by and let this situation go unchecked. Before the end of the calendar year, Mom would probably have a half dozen or more feral cats living and reproducing in her shed. Here are a couple of photos of the little hissers. If you're interested in having one of the little girlies, please let me know :). They will all be tested, vaccinated and spayed and could make a good yard pet to keep the mice in check.