Young yellow tomcat on doorstep. “Who are you?” was the first thing I said to him.
Does not look or act like a neighboring barn cat: meowing at house door, sleek coat not thick enough for a cat outdoors all winter. Much yowling. Doors shut inbetween my yowling neutered tom and Who-Are-You. Who-Are-You is now shut in spare bedroom, which I hope he’s not pissing all over. (Yes, he has a cat pan. Also food and water, which he was pleased about.) He wanted back out, but for one thing I want to be able to let my cats out without a fight, and for another forecast for tonight is below zero F and he really doesn’t look dressed for it. Looks to me like a mostly-but-not-quite-grown tom; very orange tabby.
I have called several neighbors; my vet.; the county humane society; the county Animal Control; and semi-local radio hotline, at the last of which I left a message (they run call-in listings early in the morning; I called them once years ago about a found dog and the people who’d lost the dog had just called in ten minutes before.) Vet. says if nobody turns up they can check him for a chip, though they’re dubious that a tomcat is chipped (I suppose most people who get their cats chipped also neuter them. Balls are smallish but they look to me like they’re there; and area around door sure smells like tomcat.)
I am fantasizing hearing a car coming up the road with people leaning out the windows calling for their cat. So far this does not seem to be actually happening.
The three cats who have been living here are none of them happy about the situation. Who Are You seems pretty relaxed about it; though he would prefer to come out of the room. I’m not at all sure that he realizes that he’d be coming out into an attack by two of the others (the Old Cat I expect would sit this one out.) They’d probably get over it in time; but tonight is not the time.
(I don’t, somehow, feel that he’s Cecil, or Roger. He’s definitely not Tommy, who was a Siamese of my childhood. Maybe Rudy – he is rather ruddy. Maybe he’s Mert – I’ve kind of wanted to name a cat Merton for years, because cats can say Mrrrt; though not all cats say it, and I haven’t heard this one say it yet. But he’d better stay Who Are You? for now, just in case somebody shows up and answers the question. This is certainly a cat who’s been in a house before; and well fed and patted.)
I can hear somebody upstairs saying “RRRRrrrrrrrrrrowWWwowrrrrr”; though not very loudly. And there’s a good latch on that door, for situations just like this.
When I’ve brought foster cats home my 2 Siamese go into a snit like you wouldn’t believe.
I’ve found just throwing the noob right in the mix and let fortune favor the luckiest(if the foster is well and in the right weight class)
My 2 are all noise it seems. You might get a slap fest over feeding time.
I do separately feed the noob.
Goes w/o saying YMMV.
It’s never lasted 2 days. My cut-off would be a week.
Good luck with your little stranger.
Put a posting on your local FB pets lost and found page, and on your Nextdoor.com page. Just in case.
On Christmas Day my neighbors called me, asking if one of the two feral cats I was adopting through a local TNP program was loose, because they had a yellow tom on their porch and he wouldn’t leave. I said neither of my ferals is yellow, but they could stick him in the extra crate in my barn - he was welcome to be a 3rd barn cat. For 3 weeks, he meet me in the pasture and walked with me to my barn, ate, and hung out for scritches. Then suddenly he was gone as soon as he came. None of the neighbor have seen him. We assume he might have come from some houses built behind my farm about 1/4 mile away, and went back when the weather turned colder.
I don’t do Facebook, and I don’t think there is a Nextdoor group in my area, though it seems difficult to tell without signing up. A fair percentage of the neighbors are Old Order Mennonite, though, and not on the net at all; and the rest of us are pretty scattered; it doesn’t seem to be what Nextdoor’s set up for. (I did put the word out on the Mennonite grapevine, by calling one such neighbor. The cat’s unlikely to be from such a household, though, as they generally only have barn cats – those do wander through here from time to time, but they show no signs of trying to come into the house let alone of being entirely comfortable shut in a room in a house, and in February they’d almost certainly have thicker coats.)
There are some lost-pet sites on line, I think; I’ll probably investigate some of those tomorrow if the radio doesn’t turn up anybody.
Beckdawrek, I like to let cats get a good smell of each other under doors for a while before introducing. And Who Are You is a full tom, and one of mine fights hard enough that I’ve had to treat abscesses before from a meeting with a wandering tom out in the barn, never mind right inside the house. I don’t think the fight would be all noise, if I let it happen now. By the time it’s been a week or two, it might well be at least mostly noise; plus which, if Who Are You is staying, he’s got a trip to the vet. in his future.
I did take some pictures; but I don’t have an account anywhere on a hosting site, and I gather that I can’t upload them direct to the SDMB from my computer.
Go to imgur.com and hit the “new post” button. Drag and drop your pic onto the square that shows up. When you see the picture, right click on it and “copy link location” then come here and paste it in the thread. Done!
Don’t you have to set up an Imgur account first?
– maybe I will get an account there; but I’m one of those people who actually have to read the terms first, for all the good it does me, as they generally amount to ‘we can do what we want and you agree that you can’t do anything about it.’
– Cat is still in spare bedroom. Knocked some things over overnight; well, he’s a cat. Wants pats with his food; is taking being shut up surprisingly well. Maybe despite that sleek coat he’d been on his own longer than I’d guessed and is right now just pleased to be inside. The others have stopped guarding the door, unless they see me going in there.
Imgur is great because no, you don’t have to set up any sort of account you can just hop over and host a pic willy nilly–about 95% of the pics on reddit are hosted there. Once posted the pics are public though so I wouldn’t drop anything there that has identifying information in it but cat pics? Most of the site is cat pics!
