Land of Oz

Cat Trapping

Now that I have your attention -- actually I am trapping cats. And so is my neighbor across the street and coincidently enough, there was another guy in town in last week's paper who was doing the same. I can't say it's too cool to trap the cats. The problem is that there are so many of them. In the last few weeks, the neighbor caught 4 cats and 2 opossums, I caught 3 cats and 2 opossums, and the guy in the paper caught over 6 cats.

I tried to put off catching them, since I kind of like cats, but there's just too many. A few weeks ago we came home after dark and there were 5 cats sitting on our driveway looking like we were intruders. A week or so after that I happened to look at a vacant lot behind my house and it looked like a miniature Serengheti travelogue. There were about 4 cats sitting in the deep grass looking like a pride of lions looking for dinner.

The 'possum I got the other day had some kind of nasty growth on its chin and sat there shaking and hissing. That one I took to the shelter. Actually all the cats we've caught have ended up at the shelter. Most are quite feisty - not to mention just plain anti-social. The one I caught today was so violent I had to wear gloves even though it was in a live-caught cage. It hissed and scratched and ran around like nuts. I'd hate to see some young kid trying to pet that cat.

So, how about taking care of your cats? Instead of running around complaining how people are mistreating the loose feral strays running around, how about keeping your pets under control? There's at least three houses in the near vicinity that keep cat food out on their porch for strays. We had two cats running around this month getting ready to drop a litter - litters of kittens that in all probability will starve or fall prey to some of the dogs that people don't keep care of.