This handsome stranger strolled into my yard and seems to like it here. He has an appointment with the vet on Wednesday, should he hang around until then, at which time he will be scanned to see if he has a chip, and then immunized and snipped.
The issues here are:
(1) He’s only been around a week. I’m a proponent of spaying/neutering your pets, but this is a handsome, friendly, affectionate sweetie. He’s obviously been well treated by people, so it worries me that he’s someone else’s cat. I would not neuter someone else’s cat. I’ve been looking for “lost cat” signs, checked the paper, didn’t see anything matching his description. And, despite being handsome, he was fairly gaunt and extremely grateful for a few scoops of Meow Mix, although he has since let us know that his preference is canned food. On Wednesday it will be a week since he showed up–does that seem long enough for someone in the neighborhood to get the word out? Esp. considering he must have been at large for at least a couple of days.
(2) He has really unusual markings, and even if he turns out to be my cat, which I would normally neuter, if he’s exceptional enough to be breeding stock then I would reconsider. (I mention this only because, years and years ago, my housemates got ripped for neutering a “tri-colored male” calico-type cat–another one who showed up on our doorstep and who was so mellow we thought he had already been neutered, until he knocked up one housemate’s un-spayed Persian. After the fact, a lot of people told us we could have rented him out, although his issue with the Persian turned out to be pretty undistinguished.)
I realize #2 here is a long shot. Here’s what he looks like: a standard shorthaired American tabby, with tiger stripes on his legs and tail, and spots like an ocelot on his sides. Never saw that before in a house cat.
I figure the vet isn’t going to find an identifying chip in this kitty. Who would go to the trouble to do that and not neuter the cat? (I could be way off about this, I guess. The vet’s receptionist seemed to think that lots of people might get the chip and leave the tomcat intact.)
We have an almost identical situation happening here. A charming young male showed up several days running and being cute and engaging, had talked his way into breakfast by day four. He’d been slim and appeared very hungry but otherwise healthy so we assumed he was missing from somewhere. We advertised to no avail, but attached a note to him requesting a call from anyone who knew his whereabouts, and discovered he lives locally.
The people he “lives” with have never had him fixed and since he now spends half his time at our house, we feel that we are his joint parents. Unfortunately the vet said that we would be unable to have him neutered without his actual owners’ permission, and these people won’t give it.
Him not being neutered is a problem for us since he sprays around the property, both inside and out. Locking him out is not an option either - our other two cats wouldn’t be able to get in if we locked the cat doors. And he’s a very engaging little guy so, apart from the stink, we really enjoy his company.
So, whether your visitor is a valuable breed or a moggy, you may have to persuade the vet that the cat actually belongs to you before he/she will do the op. This may mean having him scanned at one place and snipped at another.
Sounds like he’s either an Ocicat (a gorgeous, very expensive breed which looks like a miniature ocelot, with toffee-colored eyes), or a spotted brown tabby. Since anyone missing an Ocicat would certainly be looking for it, odds are he’s a spotty tabby. These aren’t horribly common, but they’re not horribly unusual, either. I’ve got one, one of the guys I work with has one, and we’ve got at least three more as patients at the clinic. Eponine’s got the distinct tabby stripes on her legs and tail, and muted stripes mingled with orange spots on her body and head, along with toffee-colored eyes. She’s a terribly striking cat, but she’s just a plain old domestic short-hair. Some spotted tabbies have black or gray spots instead of orange.
Yeah, a week is plenty long enough for someone to be looking for their cat if they’re going to. No, he’s not breeding stock. There are far too many dsh’s out there already, thank you very much, and if he is an ocicat no reputable breeder would use him without papers anyway. Any breeder willing to pay a stud fee would want to see his pedigree, and any backyard breeder ought to be drowned in the nearest river.
Who’d chip their cat and not get him snipped? Lots of people, unfortunately. We diagnose a depressing number of patients with testicle toxicity. It’s not really a subject you want to get me started on unless you’ve got a few hours to listen and a nice tall soapbox for me to stand on. And a towel to catch the spittle when I start foaming at the mouth.
Anyway, if he’s chipped, call his owners and have them come get him. If he’s not chipped, he’s your kitty. Test him for feline leukemia and FIV, check him for parasites, vaccinate him, and have him deballed.
According to Messybeast, tortoiseshell toms are not financially valuable, only scientifically and emotionally valuable.
If you’re gonna keep him, by all means neuter him. A wamdering intact male is a fight waiting to happen. Even if HE’S mellow, other toms in the neighborhood will take offense at his very existence, and pick a fight with him.
There are, unfortunately, a LOT of people who don’t take their cats with them when they move. I cannot understand this. These people will pet their cats, feed them, and let them in their homes…but when they move, they leave Fluffy behind. I don’t know what they’re thinking. I once moved two cats overseas, when I really couldn’t afford it, because they were my cats. They belonged to me, and I belonged to them.
IMO, there are also far too many domestic long hairs, too.
Any reputable breeder is NOT going to want a random source cat, no matter how striking his looks are… There’s no telling what sort of genetic makeup he has. Just get him a health checkup, get his vaccinations, get him snipped, and love him.
Same here. When my mom moved halfway across the country, the cats went with her. A lot of her friends thought she was crazy. Thought that she “wasted” her money. She didn’t care. She thought some of them were heartless, actually, with their attitudes about animals.
We’ve got a mighty fine (Mighty Fine, I’m telling you!) kitty that we suspect was abandoned by owners who moved. We don’t know for sure, but we suspect. He is the finest beast that ever was. Big, burly, soft fur, wonderful temper, beautiful seafoam green eyes, and the longest whiskers ever. He wasn’t neutered when we found him, but he is now. A very content kitty he is too. Whoever left him behind, well, it’s their loss. He’s our kitty now.
Many places do have leash laws for cats, meaning your cats aren’t supposed to wander all over the place. The Animal Control authorities here say that if you feed a cat for a certain amount of time it is your cat and you are responsible for it.
I intend to neuter a couple cats that have been hanging around my house if I can catch them and I think they may belong to my neighbors. They probably won’t even notice if the animals are gone for a day and show up again without their balls. At least one is constantly spraying on my front porch, both get up in my windows and taunt my cats. These cats both look scrawny and have bad hair coats and probably have FeLV or FIV and it irks me to no end that I keep my cats completely indoors to keep them safe and I have someone else’s “pets” coming onto my property and possibly exposing my cats to diseases.
We’ve gone through this with a number of strays. We give it a month of earnest searching for the parental units. If nothing pans out, we neuter/spay.
I love a new kitty. Domino is our latest. We had him snipped, but he’s so mutherin’ fat we’re worried about his health. We’re putting him on diet food today to see if that’ll help.
Well, I think you should go through with the snipping, but I’m biased. Thanks to a intact female and many intact males that were either dumped on our property or just wandered in, we’ve been overrun with kittens. I’m slowing neutering my way through the colony.
This is what most of the tabbies in my colony look like. A couple are striped, the rest are spotted and very stiking. I wouldn’t consider it rare. As said earlier, if it was an expensive pedigreed cat, it would most likely be chipped and you’d have seen ads for it.
As long as you’ve made the effort to try and find his owners, I say go for it.
After I posted this I thought–Wow, even if he is valuable, I don’t want to get into the cat-breeding business. And right, he’d need papers. So he’s going to be chipped and then snipped. I really don’t think the vet will give us any trouble, unless he does have a chip–and then of course we’d call his owners. With regret, but we’d call 'em.
FWIW, I did have a tom cat, intact for several years, who did not spray. In face he was a perfect gentleman in the house–didn’t jump on the counters, didn’t scratch the furniture, didn’t claw the carpets. He did get into lots of fights–he was a big guy, but his ears attested that he didn’t always get the better of his opponents. After a couple of years we did have him fixed, though, and it changed his behavior not a whit. In other words he’d still occasionally disappear for days, and come back ragged, and dirty and in need of TLC.
So really the only reason to neuter this guy is the kitten issue. Does anybody do cat vasectomies?
Slight hijack on the “moving with cats” issue. We are very cat-friendly. I currently have only 2, and my sister has four. Last year her husband retired and they decided to move from here in NJ to New Mexico. There is no way the kitties could have been trusted to the airlines to do lord knows what with them in a baggage compartment. So they sold one of their cars and bought a big enough vehicle so that four large and comfortable carriers would fit in the back. It took I think three days or so to make the cross-country trip. Sis said the cats yelled all day every day until they stopped for the night. All are now happily ensconced in NM and doing nicely. My husband and I don’t consider this to have been an exceptional thing; what else could one do?
One goes to the vet beforehand and gets a fistful of kitty tranquilizers. I’ve moved cross-country with three cats, my then 8 year old daughter, and a hamster. Only the hamster gave me no trouble. My daughter was co-operative, but not much help, being a grade-schooler. The cats did NOT want to take their pills, but I insisted, and each day, I could count on the cats hollering for a few minutes and then the pills would kick in. My husband moved a few days later, with the German shepherd. He said that she loved it. He didn’t feed her dog food on the road, he just ordered from windows, and she got whatever he felt like having, be it hamburgers or chicken nuggets.
As for the OP, just get him neutered. It really won’t hurt the cat in the long run, and will probably help.
Well, actually, there are other reasons to get him neutered besides the kitten issue. There’s stuff like testicular and prostate problems. Besides, nobody does vasectomies on cats. It’s faster, easier, more effective, and healthier for the cat to just pop those suckers on out of there.
One caveat: have you called the local animal shelter and tried to file a found report? Some people aren’t very bright about how they look for their animals, and they start and end with checking the local shelter; checking with them yourself when you find an animal is usually a good idea.
Especially if, later on, the person contests ownership with you: that way, you can show you went to reasonable lengths to find the original owner.
