Rescued for Christmas
This content was preserved from the original amberfoundation.org page. The Amber Foundation was Dennis’ attempt to share information on feral cat care and especially treating feline mange.
This is the story of our first Cat Rescue project.
The Story
I changed jobs in July 2007, to a company located in an office building across the street from the Bella Terra mall in Huntington Beach. It’s fairly common for people from our office to go across to the mall for lunch in one of the restaurants, or pick up something at the food court.
One day, Dean, Mark, and Linda came back from lunch with a special opportunity to tease me a little. “Hey, Dennis! We found a cat out near the Bella Terra sign!” They knew about my fondness for cats, and couldn’t resist. “Wanna take him home?”
It started out as a good-natured kidding. But as I thought about it, I got worried. What was a cat doing out there, hanging around at the mall?
Dean and Mark offered to show me the cat, and Dean even got some leftovers he had in the fridge and cut some pieces of Lucille’s pork and put it on a paper plate. Then the three of us trooped down stairs and across the street.
The place in question is an intersection of a road that encircles the mall and a road that goes into the mall’s parking structure. At the intersection of these roads is a sign, set diagonally as to be seen from both roads. The sign is surrounded on the other sides by shrubbery. And as we approached the sign, there was the cat – a small, orange-striped guy, lying on the mulch near the side of the sign, in a sunny spot. I guessed he might be 4-5 months old. Still a kitten, really. He opened an eye as we approached. We came closer and he got up. Dean threw him a piece of pork, and he wolfed it down as if he were starving. Maybe he was. We came a little closer, and he vanished without a trace.
We spent about 15 minutes looking through the shrubbery, but didn’t see the kitten again. I took the rest of the meat and put it down on some clean leaves in a place behind the sign, a bit further from the foot traffic.
And we pondered.
Nobody had ever seen cats around there. There was no sign of a mom-cat to take care of the little guy. And the nearest residential neighborhood was several blocks away. Conclusion: the kitten was dumped there.
God, I hate people who do that! If you decide you don’t want a pet anymore, take it to a shelter. Many pet stores will take a pet and give it away – to somebody who will be buying supplies for years thereafter. Offer it to friends and coworkers. Hell, even put it painlessly to death. But to take a domestic animal and simply abandon it in an area that has no food and plenty of automobile traffic. That’s beyond cruel!
Now, I must admit to having a slight bias against orange-striped cats. I had a bad experience years ago, when Bandit was sick, dying. And this big orange-striped tom cat decided to muscle into Bandit’s turf while he was unable to properly defend it. I know that Big Orange was just doing what boy cats do. But Bandit had staked out his place first, and it wasn’t a fair contest with Bandit sick. So I went to Bandit’s defense, using a Super Soaker to chase off Big Orange whenever he came into my yard. I never wanted to hurt Big Orange, but I wanted my yard to be a safe refuge for Bandit. After Bandit died, I put the Super Soaker away and made my peace with Big Orange. He remembered my chasing him out, and was always a little leery of me. But in the end, Big Orange came to me when he was dying. So I guess he forgave me, or at least he knew that I would do my best for him in his hour of need. He was already dead when I found him, curled up in the middle of the big planter in the back yard. I buried him there, with full honors. So, I try to get over it, but I’m not particularly fond of orange-striped cats. I told myself that my personal feelings didn’t matter – what had been done to this kitten was just plain wrong.
So, we launched a project to rescue the kitten and find him a home.
Dean volunteered for the hard part – finding a home for the kitten. He thought that his father might appreciate a pet. And Dean himself has three young girls at home. The cat would be welcome to pass through, and if he bonded with the girls, he might even stay at Dean’s.
Mark, Dean, and Linda went on cat-watch – looking for the little guy whenever they happened to be near the sign.
And I took up feeding duty.
The cornerstone of my plan was to regularly put out food and water behind the Bella Terra sign. It would keep the cat away from the mall shops (which the mall would likely appreciate), keep him out of the street (for his own safety), and accustom him to hanging around that location. And when he knew that he could always find food there … we could put the food in a trap and catch him.
So I went to Wal-Mart and bought a couple of bowls, each having dual compartments for food and water. I got cans of wet food, and several cans of Vienna Sausage – I figured that it was portable, he could grab a sausage in his mouth and take it to a hiding place. I got green bowls, so they wouldn’t stand out too much under the shrubbery. And I wrote on the side
Please help us rescue a kitten. Leave this here!
My schedule was simple: morning and evening feedings during the week; once a day over the weekend (the mall is a half-hour drive from my house). And it seemed to work, in that the food was disappearing. All of it. The bowls were licked clean.
The first kitten sighting was Thursday, December 6. I bought the supplies that night and started feeding the next morning. I carried on through the weekend. And on Monday, when I went out to put out breakfast, the bowl was gone. I thought that the gardeners may have taken it, so I waited a few hours, got out the second bowl, loaded it up, and put it out. When I went out to feed dinner, the second bowl was gone. I left Vienna Sausages on a clean leaf and went home by way of Wal-Mart, where I bought two more bowls.
The next day, I consulted the office secretary. “Sandy, I need a favor. Can you get me the telephone number of somebody in mall management?” I explained about the kitten rescue project and that somebody was taking up the bowls. “I’d like to talk to them, and let them know that this is just a temporary thing to get the kitten out of the mall, not to establish a permanent feeding station.” Sandy did better than give me a number, she made the calls herself, climbing the phone tree at the management company that runs both the mall and the office building that we occupy. She found out what the official policy was, and what wiggle room I might be able to expect. One of the rules was that they didn’t want to see any bowls or traps. I carefully tucked the bowls under the shrubs, where they were unlikely to be seen, and as long as I subtle, they could look the other way. But my humane Hav-a-Hart trap was quite large. I couldn’t really hide it, but could probably get away with it if the trap was only there for a short time. This made it more important to get the kitten used to food behind the Bella Terra sign.
When I went down to put out breakfast an hour later, the second bowl was back! Score one for communication. And to keep the channels open, I wrote a note outlining my plan, giving my cell number, e-mail, and web site. I rolled it up and sealed it in a zip-lock, and kept it under the bowl. Two days later, the note disappeared and the bowl was left alone.
I figured that it would take at least a week to get the cat accustomed enough enough to the food that he would walk into a trap at that location. I kept putting out the food, but nobody ever saw the cat. Our watchers kept looking, but some around the office were starting to lose faith. “Something’s eating that food”, I declared. “No proof that it’s the kitten, but there’s something hungry out there!” I wanted so much to believe that the kitten was still safe. I kept feeding.
The kitten became a regular topic of conversation in our part of the office. Have you seen him? Do you think he’s still around? Do you really think he was abandoned? What are you going to do next? When are you going to trap him? Do you have a home lined up for him? People wondered what I was feeding the kitten. All they had to do was walk over to the drawer in my desk where I always keep free food and snacks for my coworkers. There, amongst the boxes of cookies and bowls of ramen noodles, was a small stack of Special Kitty canned cat food – and some cans of Vienna Sausage.
Dean was surprised by the Vienna Sausage. I explained that I wanted to give a variety of food, and even though the little canned sausages weren’t designed with cat nutrition in mind, it would be healthy enough. But that wasn’t why Dean was surprised. “We used to eat this stuff all the time when we were kids!” So I offered Dean a can of the Vienna Sausage, and he took it into the lunch room, microwaved it until warm, and set up a plate with little sausages and toothpicks in them. He then went around to all of the developers and offered them a bit of a great memory from his past. I only hoped that the kitten liked the sausages as well as Dean did. At least the food bowls down near the Bella Terra sign were being licked clean.
On Thursday, December 13, one week since the first and only kitten sighting, I was late in putting out breakfast. (I do have to work for a living.) And Linda, Mark, and Dean came back from lunch saying, “We saw the cat!” I soon put out the food, and it was gone an hour later. So, the plan is sound: get the kitten used to breakfast in the morning. Skip breakfast, and he comes out.
I decided to spring the trap on the following Tuesday, which would give me time to get the trap out of storage and check it out, get through the weekend, and reestablish the breakfast schedule on Monday. If we were lucky, we would have the cat safe in hand before the rain storms started later in the week.
Thursday night, I left a new note under the food bowl, explaining that we were going to make our first trap attempt on the 18th. Hopefully the kitten would be too young to know how to read the note.
I got the Hav-A-Hart trap out of storage, washed off the dust, and checked that it worked properly. Then I put a layer of masking tape on the part of the trap that was flat metal and wrote a message there: KITTEN RESCUE This humane trap won’t hurt him, but he may be scared. We will check the trap every 45 minutes. If there is an animal in this trap, please call …
I also stopped at Wal-Mart and looked over “disposable” cell phones. Perhaps I could hook one up to the trap and have the kitten call me when he was ready to be picked up. I really didn’t want the kitten to spend much time in the trap, scared and confined. But I didn’t see any cell phones inexpensive enough to justify the effort. I’d just have to check the trap often.
Tuesday, December 18, rolled around. I loaded the car with trap, a bowl that would fit in the trap, cat carrier, and a towel to line the floor of the carrier. I skipped kitty breakfast, and set up the trap after lunch. What to bait it with? Smelly canned food would be a strong draw for the cat. But if we got him, we would have to bring him into the office until the work day was over. I decided on Vienna Sausage. I finished setting up at exactly 2PM. I went back to the office and told Dean. He offered to alternate with me, somebody checking the trap every half hour instead of my planned 45 minutes.
I went down at 2:30, found no cat, and was back in at my desk with a round-trip time of 8 minutes. I started to formulate a “Plan B” in case we didn’t catch the kitten that day. I could probably get away with leaving the trap out for three hours. If that didn’t do it, I could try again the next day. I tried to keep my mind on my work, but thought of the forecast rain storm kept popping up. I didn’t want the little guy to spend days in the cold and wet. If I could help it. If I could catch him. If he was there. Hell – we had no proof that the kitten was even still out there.
Dean went down at 3:00, and minutes later he called me from his cell phone, “We got cat!” I was thrilled, and a little dubious of our good fortune. Was he kidding me? “No! Really! We got the kitty!” I literally ran to the elevator, fumed while it took me down five floors, and sprinted across the street. And, sure enough, there was Dean, kneeling near the trap, with a small orange-striped kitten inside.
We carried the trap to my car. I transferred the kitten into the cat carrier and put away the trap. We took the carrier up to the office, and set it up with a towel to curl up on, food, and water. The kitten sat quietly in the back. He was well behaved, and when Dean went home that night, Dean pulled the “look what followed me home” number on his wife.
Dean’s kids got along great with the kitten, and the kitten quickly got used to the humans – confirming in my mind that he wasn’t really feral, and had indeed been dumped.
The next day, Dean brought in some pictures of kitten and kids. Just looking at them, it was clear that Dean’s dad wasn’t going to get that cat. The kids had a new pet, and the little Bella Terra kitten had already found a home – exactly one week before Christmas.
– Dennis Griesser
Some Pictures
Dennis checks out the trap, and says soothing things to the kitten.
The little guy set up in the cat carrier, waiting for the work day to be over so he can go home with Dean.
Merry Christmas!