In our small neighborhood, we have about 5 stray cats.
Well, the female one got pregnant.
We don’t know who the father is and apparently shes given birth.
I don’t want to see 5 or so kittens grow up feral.
I know the place under a porch where shes apparently got them.
Pretty sure.
uestion: Should I call the apl?
A neighbor thinks they will put her to sleep if shes taken in.
The kittens aren’t old enough to be weaned yet.
Should I call and have them picked up or not?
I met someone who just adopted 2 little kittens from a shelter. Each one fits in your palm. They’re so cute. You could call and ask about what they do with these.
Is the mother cat approachable, or is she utterly wild? If she’s a decent cat, they’ll give her a chance to be adopted, most likely. A totally wild one has no chance of being adopted, so those are usually euthanized immediately. I’m not sure how the local facility will handle one who’s wild but nursing. Depending on the cat and what sort of resources they have available, they’ll do one of three things. They’ll either let the mother continue nursing the kittens, wean them, and then put everyone up for adoption, euthanize the mother, bottle feed the kittens and adopt them out, or worst-case scenario, euthanize all of them. Call and ask.
Also, if you can’t get to the mother, you could try getting the kittens out when she’s not around and bottle feed them for a few weeks. Either way, the earlier you get them interacting with people the better they’ll acclimate.
In some places people put food out for feral cats so life isn’t too hard on them, unless they get ill.
Some animal charities recognise this and are willing to neuter them and release them back into their territory.
So if you can assure the charity that this is the case then they may not euthanise them, and the kittens need to be caught just after weaning, any delay means that they lose thier cuteness, and often just hide away in a corner of their pen, making them less homeable.
If you catch the kittens before they are weaned, they might find new owners easily enough but the mother will just go on season sooner and in a few weeks there will be more, see if your local animal shelter will put out traps for her.
The best way to do this is to feed them to a routine and gain some of their confidence, and then put out the trap baited with a smelly oily fish like mackeral, and miss out on morings meal.You will catch one moggy an dits just a matter of getting it neutered.
You should be able to account for most of the colony this way.
Another way is to feed them in a porch or garage, and when you have your target inside, hten just close the door and call the charity workers in, unless you are brave and foolhardy and wish to put them in a cage yourself.
Is there a no-kill shelter anywhere near you? Alternatively, any chance you could take care of the kitties for a bit and then find homes for them yourself, if none of the above ideas works out?
From this site:
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My first response would be to see if there is any program like this operating in your area. If you don’t, my second response would be to call a shelter and have them taken away anyway (all the feral cats in the neighbourhood, that is). I don’t believe feral cats have a good quality of life, and they will breed themselves into a population explosion very quickly. I hate the thought of feral cats being euthanized, but that is the harsh reality when cat owners refuse to be responsible for their own pets and abandon them, especially without spaying/neutering first.
One idea from the Feral Cat Coalition that is interesting is the idea of becoming a feral cat caretaker. Do you have any interest in becoming a cat caretaker, Vanilla?
I recommend feeding them, and feeding them well, including the mother. A cat that seems really “wild” may just be freaked out because it is starving. My mom had been feeding an abandoned cat that lived in an apartment complex where she works, a slice of lumchmeat, something just to keep him from starving to death… He was quite wild, would just grab the food and run, didn’t want anything to do with humans. One day she gave him a dish of actual cat food, and once he had actually eaten enough to have a full tummy, he became quite friendly and affectionate.
Thunder lives with us now.
If the cat is wild, but responds to being fed well, she may turn out to be adoptable. At any rate, if the kittens are accustomed to humans, they should be easy to find homes for.
A neighbor lady lets the mother cat into her house and feeds it.
No one knows where she is hiding the kittens yet.
We’re guessing they are only a week or so old.
But still-they deserve Inside homes, especially in the lousy ohio winters that come soon.
No-we live with my parents, who do Not want any animals in their house.
My son would love it though, but we don’t have a place of our own. Yet.
Will keep you updated.
Even if you can’t take them in yourself, you might be able to arange for homes before you catch them. Catching a feral kitten is no easy task, but my aunt has had one of the two we caught for about six years now, and loves him to bits. The other one was our pet for four years, but took off one night - she was an indoor/outdoor cat- after our other female cat gave it grief for weeks and made her feel unwelcome. My mom swears she’s seen her a couple of times, and we wish she’d come back. At least she’s spayed and living in the country instead of the city, so her life isn’t as hard as her mom’s, wherever she is. (yes, I believe she’s alive.)
Our case was a bit different, though. A stay cat kept her kitten near my great-grandmother’s garage, and when they were about six or seven weeks old, they were attacked by possums. One of the three kittens died, one was hurt, and their mom took off- probably assuming they were all dead. We nursed the hurt one back to health and the one that got through it ok is Auntie’s 
I worry then, becasue our neighborhood(actually a circle street of condos) has Lots of skunks around, and we hope they don’t find the kittens.
Tough call- I supported a colony of feral kittens/mother cat while in law school, because I couldn’t stand the idea of them starving.
Saw them near the dumpster near my apartment complex one day, and then the next. Worried I put out scraps and such. Then just started buying the dang 5 pound bags of cat food (Chef’s Blend- their secret motto “Always on sale”). Other people did it too- but I was Mr. Dependable always feeding those dang cats- who never once thanked me. They did recognize me though “Mr. Food” not a threat, but not completely trustworthly either. I would also buy the canned stuff as a “treat” for them. Oy. Eventually they were trapped by a catch and adopt program. I talked to the people doing it- if they were going to kill them I was ready to destroy those traps without hestitation.
I am not really a “nice” person per se, but there was something about those cats. I am not really religious, but a felt as if this was a test of my humanity (sounds silly writinf it- but hey). Do something for them, even though I would get no thanks, didn’t have the money for cat food or take the easy road and ignore them as someone else’s problem.
Suprising myself, the answer was feed the dang cats. Rain, no money, school-- I was out there feeding those moochy felines. And I did get something out of it- satisfaction. Watching those cats eat did make me feel pretty good.
Not sure if this really helped- but there it is.
I worked in an office, connected to a factory that had a junkyard behind it. Baby kitties were born in the junkyard. We did the same thing. We took care of them rain or shine, and once had to dig a huge trench in the snow because a plow had unknowingly plowed them in. (They lived under a big trailer – one cat had singed whiskers, so there was some warm pipe or something under there.)
The cat’s recognized the “Food Humans.” When they trusted us enough, we trapped the two girls in the hopes that we’d get them before they got pregnant. (Population control a must!)
A little too late. They had their babies in captivity and were sent to foster homes while they weaned. These foster homes deal with “special needs” cats ie/ trapped feral cats, disabled cats and other “hard to adopt” cats with medical of behaviour problems. Everyone got adopted.
I kept the one feral mom. Incredibly loving if she knows you, but still goes into “feral-mode” with strangers. Quite skittish. It takes her about four days to get used to new people. Her sister was fixed and returned to the (supervised) wild of the junkyard because she was very nasty for awhile. We took very good care of her (she got plowed in again and there was quite a crew of employees digging her out – it looked like a dramatic rescue operation!)
After a few more months in the junkyard, she lost her nastiness. I was leaving the job there, so to be sure she was always in the best of care I picked her up again (that’s how everyone new I was quitting… When I picked up Earnie, it meant I must be leaving.) She went back into foster care – she has since been adopted. Like her sister, she loves her main human, but gets skittish with strangers.
You have to seek out a “cat rescue” organization because a lot of “no kill” shelters aren’t quite as “no kill” as you’d think when it comes to feral cats. A lot of shelters shy away from feral cats because with so many “nice” tame ones, the “hard to adopt” cats put a strain on their resources. Or so they’ve said. Look for a rescue organization.
I’d agree that life for a feral cat is dicey at best… weather, predators, natural and man-made hazards, disease, starvation… tough life and pretty chancey. BTW, the thing about cats is that they’re seasonally polyestrous, so they go into heat every few weeks in the spring/summer/fall, which makes for a lot-o-potential for kittens. Worse, they’re induceable ovulators, which means that if the queen encounters and breeds a tom, she’ll ovulate in response to breeding whether or not she was in heat to start with. They also tend to be excellent mothers and have a reasonable chance of rearing kittens to surviving breeding-age cats. So the potential for a little population explosion is pretty notable, and don’t expect it to necesarily get better come winter (I have a cat who was born in the wild in January in Alaska, which means he was concieved in November, long after the daylight length should have discouraged any inclination towards ovulation in his mother. Fortunately she moved them into the henhouse of a client of mine and the client trapped all the kittens and the mother one at a time, and brought them in for - and paid for, bless her heart - leukemia tests, neutering and vaccines. All got adopted, including the wild mother, who was initially quite a little hellion. But not every cat is lucky enough to find someone who will pay for the workup - if they’d been leukemia positive we would have probably humanely destroyed them - or pay for the neutering. Well, I didn’t charge for the one I adopted, and I’m not sure he feels all that lucky to live with a vet (I could produce a rectal thermometer at any moment, dontcha know), but he certainly does love people, petting, warmth and regular meals.)
Good advice on the shelters and so on… Our animal control up here will lend you live traps - you might see if yours will. And worst case, isn’t it better for them to be humanely destroyed than to freeze and go thirsty and starve and be run over by cars and die of disease and be mauled by skunks and dogs and owls and shot by teenagers with bb guns and no compassion? - Not to mention producing many more generations of cats to endure such misery. Poor little things. A shelter at least offers the chance of finding them homes and seems better than nothing. If there are better alternatives, by all means go for them. Good luck with that.
Check out Alley Cat Allies, at http://www.alleycat.org. They have links to many feral cat groups that can help you with trapping mother and kittens for neutering and adoption. If you can manage to bag and fix all five of the local strays, you will have prevented a great deal of suffering.
There is also a huge amount of information on this problem at http://cats.about.com. There is a message board where you can find more advice than you ever wanted on cat care, and also lots of info on TNR (trap-neuter-release).
I had a teacher,years ago that actually had humane traps around her neighborhood and would trap feral cats, have them nutered and re-release them. ( I dont know how she could afford all this, she was a teacher ya know)
Sometimes some sucker of a vet just does things and “forgets” to charge for them… (whistling casually and looking around with a “who, me???” expression). Or else discounts them. And also some rescue groups will subsidise some of that; WAY cheaper to spay 10 cats than spay aaaalll the offspring of those same ten cats. You might chceck in to whether there’s a “Friends of Pets” or similar group who could help with expenses…
Always knew you were a soft-touch, AKdd!
Yeah, well, don’t let it get around.