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- Apr 2, 2017
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My job each day is to manage and care for a colony of 8 cats and 2 kittens. It began innocently with 1 semi-feral cat (White Kitty) who got pregnant 3 times and the middle litter produced 5 kittens before we finally had her spayed. The other 2 litters were searched for, and we followed White Kitty through the forest for hours but she wouldn’t lead us (myself and my girlfriend) to them. They were seemingly lost or abandoned.
This will be a long story, perhaps too long for most readers. But here I go…
I bought a house on an island and embarked on a 2 year plan to have it renovated. The semi-feral mother, White Kitty, brought her kittens down from the woods and quickly moved them into the engine block of my car, rendering the car useless for several weeks. Eventually we sorted that out and the 5 kittens (all spayed and neutered now) grew very fond of us.
Then the destruction and construction work began on the house at the end of the high tourist season (mid September), by necessity due to the law of no loud works to be done before season’s end. The house has a tiny detached ‘summer kitchen’ which is about the size of a small dorm room, with a similar sized patio and it also has a bathroom - too small for 2 people, but I could stay there and take care of the cats while my girlfriend lived on the mainland during the construction phase (7 months). I love these cats (except 1) and I wasn’t going to allow them to turn feral and suffer without food and shelter over the winter. So I committed myself to be there for them everyday. It seemed like a sensible plan.
In the interest of brevity I’m going to advance the story 3 months, to the point after the cats moved into the summer kitchen for warmth and comfort. They were sleeping above me, below me, and all around me. By the end of these 3 months I had become sleep deprived and to a degree, malnourished. They wouldn’t let me eat without wanting to taste the food first, so I had to hide to eat anything. And with 8 cats surrounding you while you’re trying to sleep, there’s always one who is cleaning itself and making noise loud enough to wake you up. With 8 cats this happens at least every 30 minutes throughout the night. Then it takes 15 minutes to get back to sleep before the next cat decides to start cleaning itself. At the end of 3 months I had to surrender the summer kitchen to the cats and move into the nearest hotel, 30 minutes away. I now currently leave from the hotel at 6:30am every morning to arrive at the house for the 7am feeding/breakfast. I stay until about 3pm, then return to the hotel.
How did I go from a litter of 5 kittens and their mother to a full-on colony of cats? When the tourist season ended, cats who had homes (or feeding stations) became very hungry and could only survive the winter by eating insects and a birds, if they were lucky. White Kitty’s 5 kittens (now young cats) attracted attention from other cats.
The first wave of feral cats to apply for refugee status were: Sick Kitty, Little Guy, Weird Gray and Brown Cat.
Sick Kitty:
A large black and white cat who would run for his life if I made a sudden movement. His eyes were almost fully crusted over and had cataracts. His ears were bald and sorely pink. Over weeks of coaxing he established a small perch that was his territory. Watching me and the other cats show affection towards each other finally broke him, and he approached me for a chin rub and back scratch. That’s when his purr mechanism kicked in for perhaps the first time in a very long time. It made the sound of misfiring piston engine, but eventually his purr came on-line and continued to work nicely . It’s possible that I was the only human to ever touch him. Being petted was his new favorite thing in the world. But Sick Kitty wasn’t very well socialized and didn’t know how to play. The other kittens tried very hard to show him that playing doesn’t equal pretending to kill kill kill the other cat, but he couldn’t get it - he had two left feet in that dance.
In about a month, Sick Kitty had most of the fur return to his ears. His crusty eyes improved a lot because he had more time to clean himself rather than desperately look for food, as before. He had some troubling signs of territorial aggression when another cat would enter his space. This is when I began formulating the ‘non-aggression principle’ with new refugees.
I went out of town for 2 nights, and when I came back to the summer kitchen, Sick Kitty was gone. And he has not returned.
Little Guy:
He arrived about the same time as Sick Kitty and the other first-wave ferals. He is 100% the sole survivor of White Kitty’s third litter, the other one that we couldn’t find. He was very healthy and had near identical markings of WK’s other kittens. but he was younger. He was totally feral and could not be approached. He enjoyed feeding times and always had a gentle curious stare, but there was no reaching him. He would sit and look at me, but if I moved he would dart off. One day, he was just gone and hasn’t returned.
Weird Gray:
I’m 98% certain WG was the soul survivor from WK’s first litter (the first one we couldn’t find). His markings are less certain than Little Guy’s, but a very close match to the other Fab 5 kittens. Weird Gray wasn’t even gray, he was/is a brown and white tabby. Somehow we attached gray to the name of this weird cat, and it stuck. He was called ‘weird’ because he has 2 speeds: stalking and running; slow and fast. His version of play was highly aggressive and more domineering than anything else. He is lean and all muscle with a very intense stare. He submitted to me quickly, rolling on his back in a plea to join the colony. Being WK’s son afforded him many passes on his aggression toward the Fabulous 5. I thought he would come around and settle down and learn how to play like the others… I was wrong.
Eventually I had to trap him to be neutered to calm him down. He had too much testosterone in his system and I could see in his eyes that he didn’t want to attack the other cats, but he just had to do it and it was out of his control. It took a month or so for the excess testosterone to leave his system, and now he has a role within the colony - that of defender of the colony, which is a very useful role. At least he doesn’t defend the colony from the actual colony members anymore… And he has deep and beautiful eyes, and loves to be petted.
Brown Cat:
BC is probably the oldest living cat on the island, and somehow he found me. I fed him along with the new arrivals and that locked him in to the colony - really locked him in. When he showed signs of aggression to the other cats I banned him on the ‘non-aggression principle’. For two weeks I used the spray bottle to chase him off. He wouldn’t leave and was always orbiting the summer kitchen. At the end of two weeks he stumbled into the kitchen and flopped down. He was totally unafraid of my spray bottle wrath and laid down to signal: ‘Kill me or feed me, and you’re going to do one or the other right now’… So he beat me. He won the war, not just the battle. I didn’t know how to deal with anything like this level of determination, so I fed him until he couldn’t eat anymore. I have limits.
But Brown Cat had/has a few medical issues. He has a growth on his lower lip, like a tumor that prevents him from eating properly. He sucks food in and his tongue is elongated. He uses his paws like spoons to scoop food into his mouth, resulting in a mess every time I feed him. He’s the leading cause of why I go through so many rolls of paper towels.
Brown Cat’s aggression towards other cats ended after he surrendered in near starvation. So he got many passes on his other problem - stealing food from other cats’ bowls. It didn’t matter if another cat had the identical food, he needed to eat their food. So the other cats would move to his food bowl and it became like musical chairs. This behavior caused many feeding problems… But there was another problem - BC has chronic nasal discharge, resulting in wet sneezing everywhere at anytime. He has a bulbous nose which I think comes from a bite or scratch across the bridge that resulted with a solidified abscess. He would sneeze into other cats’ faces or into the dry cat food bowl. He is basically snot everywhere all the time that steals food. But thankfully he wasn’t contagious.
Please keep in mind that everything happening above is taking place while my house (10 feet away from the summer kitchen) is being gutted and modified. Crews arrive everyday, plumbers and electricians and delivery trucks and guys who drill into things and use jackhammers. Just when you think the noise couldn’t get any louder they bring in another jackhammer and another guy who drills into things. And then the foreman comes into the kitchen to ask me something and all the cats scatter for their lives - the delicate peace I’ve worked all day to achieve, shattered like a feline hand grenade. It explodes at least once a week… Sometimes that cats look at me with the expression, ‘What have I got myself into?’, and I look back at them with the same expression. There’s some solidarity in that exchange and an extra cat treat helps ease the pain (and a shot of whiskey for me). But there are times that they look at you and you need to keep your cool: the sudden loud sound events. They look at me to find out if they should run. I made several mistakes with this in the beginning, and the solution to this is to blink slowly at them say a few words to in a very soft tone - do not move your head or hands since they can interpret this is a signal to bolt.
A CHALLENGER APPEARS… The Calico Kitten Story
About 1 kilometer from my house is a communal trash bin area. Cats hang out there looking for food. If I have some extra food, I’ll stop and feed the bin kitties. One day I was quietly feeding the bin kitties and I heard a meow from behind me. I turned to see a calico kitten who looked to be about 10 - 12 weeks old sitting on a stone wall. I had an extra packet of wet food and went over to put on a spot where she could eat. She ran off. But I could see her looking at me from the bushes. I put the food down and she climbed back up to eat it. Then I drove home. End of story… no.
From the trash bins to my house is a labyrinth of roads. You can’t find it unless you know where it is, or you follow someone. And follow someone she did. 3 or 4 days after that bin feeding, a calico head appeared from behind to the flu of the summer kitchen’s outdoor oven. She had followed my car over several days while I went to and from town. She had no idea how far she would have to go to find me, but took a leap of faith in a decision of complete determination… That’s all you have to do with me: I love you!
The other colony members we not as happy as me to see her. They jumped her in, or perhaps were trying to jump her out. She had the growl of a cat 10 times her size and I can only imagine how she found that voice; a survivor. After a couple of days I was able to get her alone in the kitchen while the other cats were away. Her bonding to me happened in that time - the ‘you’re my new mommy’ trance-like gaze that lasted about 30 second (very intense). When the other cats returned I needed to communicate to them that I’ve adjusted the pecking order, and the Calico Kitten was now at the top of it (for the time being, until she gets her footing) and she should not be touched. I did this by creating a new perch that was closest to the feeding area that was for her only and I would feed her first. They picked up on this quickly and the attacks stopped, but they would still pounce in her general direction and there were some other negotiations going on in cat language. I would do what I call ‘love bombing’ sessions with the Calico in order to display her status to the other cats. These sessions would last about 5 minutes several times a day and I would make sure the other cats could see it. Of course, I didn’t reduce my affection/attention exchange time with the other cats in order to not make them jealous of the Calico, but the Calico received more of my time for her safety. This time was also the beginning of the winter freeze and she didn’t have the body mass to deal with the cold. I needed to wrap her in a little blanket every morning, like a sausage to stop her shivering.
It wasn’t long before she discovered that the summer kitchen also had an interior space - the dorm sized room with a mattress and other perches to sleep on. And most importantly, an electric space heater which is on 24 hours a day. On the first night that she stayed in the room (where myself and other cats were sleeping) she stared at the space heater like it was a god. I worried that she was going to burn her nose. She worshiped the space heater for several nights. It was the cutest thing that has ever happened in the history of life on Earth. I could argue that statement in front of the United Nations and they would have no choice but to make an official declaration that this was the cutest thing that has ever happened in known history. They would give me a gold-plated plaque with the inscribed declaration and I would hang that plaque above Calico Kitty’s feeding perch.
In a week or so the other cats fully accepted her into the colony. She enjoys attacking the tips of the tails of cats who are walking by, and then she quickly retreats as if nothing ever happened. She found her paw-of-doom and uses it gently, unless you are a paper towel ball - in that case, you don’t stand a chance. She still retreats to safety after the initial melee attack on a menacing paper towel ball, but she soon returns to serve justice and restore order to the kitchen by ripping it to shreds. The other cats just watch her playing and some of them join in, unlocking their inner kitten.
From the day she arrived I knew this time would come. Males outnumber females here by 5 to 1. I was hoping for more time, but at 20+ weeks old she began emitting pheromones and the two non-neutered males (Black & White Cat [who I will describe later] and Brown Cat) started taking a special interest in the Calico Kitty. She wasn’t actually in-heat and enjoyed the seemingly friendly attention. But I felt like the father of a teenage daughter who was being groomed for sex by two gnarly dudes, and I was also feeding and housing those perverts! But of course, I didn’t blame the dudes for their normal and natural behavior. Better these guys than some strange cat. At least the dudes understand what ’no’ means, and I never witnessed any attempts by them to mount her.
Spaying the Calico: It took a week to plan. I can’t pick her up, so she needed to be trapped. I own a steel cat trap cage that I used to trap one of the other cats to be neutered and when the steel door crashed down the sound triggered him into a somersaulting panic… The Calico would need to be gently coaxed into the cage, with me holding the door and quietly closing it behind her. I lined the cage with soft fabric. I trained her to enter the cage to get treats with me holding the door up so that on trap-day she wouldn’t be concerned about the presence of my hand above the cage. The bait in trap-day was fresh anchovies that she had never tasted before. I gave her half of an anchovy at first and let that sink in. In a moment after that she realized she must have more and a silly cage wasn’t going to stand in her way. So I led her into the cage with the other half of he tiny fish, and I got her. If you ever do the anchovy maneuver, keep them in an airtight container because if the other cats get a slight whiff of this fish it can ruin you plan. Distract the other cats with treats while you’re trying to trap a single cat.
The plan to catch the Calico Kitty was intense and every move was thought out and rehearsed in my mind. The only thing that didn’t go according to plan turned out to be inconsequential. I’ll save you from all of the details, but she recovered like a champion. The only sticking point was the prescription of antibiotic pills seemed to have a side-effect that made her face and ears twitch. Since I didn’t know if she was having an allergic reaction, I kicked her off of the medication (the meds weren’t doctor’s orders, I had to ask him to give me the prescription). In 2 days she was back to protecting the kitchen from paper towel balls, like a superheroine.
I obsessed so much over the plan to spay the Calico because one of the female cats that we had spayed a year before (the mother of the Fab 5) almost died after the operation. She began bleeding and we needed to rush her back to the vet in the middle of the night. While spaying and neutering cats remember: it’s a lot harder for the girls to recover. It’s a deep abdominal operation that can have serious complications if treated casually. Older female cats take longer to recover.
ANOTHER CHALLENGER APPEARS, The Persian Kitten (and the deep freeze):
At 8 to 10 weeks old she seemed too young to be separated from her mother. But there she was: two big green eyes surrounded by black fluff and strangely stubby. She suffered the same jumping-in persecution as the Calico Kitten, but her timing was bad. She arrived the day before temperatures dropped to -7c, plus high wind. The other cats would not allow her to stay in the summer kitchen, and thankfully she managed to find access to an outdoor utility closet on the other side of the house. At least she was out of the wind.
If you’re not familiar with very cold temperatures, the difference between 0c and -7c doesn’t feel too dramatic. The big difference is in the physics - at 0c, a bowl of water can last all night a only the surface will be a bit frozen. At -7c, that same bowl of water freezes solid in 15 minutes. In 5 minutes the surface will be frozen hard.
Everything was frozen, including the pipes (so no flowing water). Cat food was frozen to the bowls and in the sink. I put dry food out for the Persian near her closet. She would meow so I tried to leave a packet of wet food out for her to see if she could eat it before it froze. It froze. The next morning the frozen food was gone. Overnight she ate a 100 gram packet of solidly frozen meat in frozen gravy, and she only weighed about 1 kilogram.
The freeze started to impact my mind. When I finally figured out that placing the cats’ water bowl inside of the summer kitchen would prevent the water from freezing - it felt to me like the moment when Einstein first discovered life on Mars.
The Persian’s jumping-in lasted 4 of the coldest days in over 9,000 years of recorded history. I didn’t think she was going to survive the freeze. On a few occasions I was able to slow-blink with her and then we were both on a mission to bond before things got worse. Finally the other cats were asleep or doing other things and we had our moment. Unlike the bonding gaze with the Calico, the Persian simply rolled over on her back when I got close to her and I could pet her immediately. I moved her into the kitchen but she didn’t have her own feeding perch that would allow me to display her inclusion in the colony to the other cats. So she would position herself be between my feet and then sit on my shoe, and that’s where I would feed her. Her personality won everyone over very quickly. The other cats were soon smelling her and bumping heads. She has a calm nature and is well socialized. I suspect that she had other siblings but somehow got separated. The Calico has become her new sister and they try to kill each other everyday when they’re not murdering paper towel balls. The Persian has advanced play skills and can play with the Fab 5 as if she was from their same litter. Her tail shakes like a rattlesnake when she’s happy, and she purrs by just looking at her.
She’s next for the visit to the vet, I just hope I get 3 more weeks before the dudes start following her around. In 3 weeks I can move into the top portion of my home which is a separate unit from the main house. I can move out of the hotel and end the commute and various other related stresses that have me pouring whiskey into my coffee, or downing a beer before the crews arrive at 7:30am.
TICKS! (Why did it have to be ticks?)
The cats don’t get fleas. They have mites that get under your skin but if you remember to wash your hands after a love-bombing session it’s not a big problem. They get ticks, though, and I hate ticks. When I was 5 years old my father told me that ticks can eat through my shoe if I step on one. The only creatures in the world who deserved to be killed on sight are mosquitos and ticks. At any given time at least one of the cats will have a tick on its neck. The cats move around too much for me to use tick tweezers to pull the tick out completely. The one time I managed to get the head out, the wound bled and then formed a pea-sized abscess that thankfully healed.
What works for me is to gently pluck (not pull) the abdomen to intentionally leave the head in the skin. It kills the tick and the head keeps the wound closed until the cat’s skin heals behind it and pushes the head out in about a week. But I have to be careful not to pull a clump of fur out with the tick abdomen or the cat will scratch at the irritation and a little bald spot will into a big bald spot. I know this is not the recommended treatment for ticks, but other than leaving the ticks to feed on the cats I don’t know what else to do. Perhaps tick medication… but I would have to routinely medicate 10 cats when only about 1 has a tick at any given time. I’d go through tick medication almost as fast as I go through cat food (and that’s the fastest speed in the Universe).
DOES THE CRAZY CAT LADY HAVE CATS BECAUSE SHE’S CRAZY, OR IS SHE CRAZY BECAUSE SHE HAS CATS?
In conclusion:
I didn’t ask for this, but I am responsible for creating the situation. Mistakes were made, but the good times outweigh the bad times. I love cats, but I’m not the Cat Man (as the builders secretly refer to me). Cats were bred to be among humans and there is a duty of care we should all have towards them (or at least something approaching that).
When the house is completed and the builders all gone, I’m going to build an Ewok Village for the colony among the many pine trees on the property. I want to move them out of the summer kitchen and try to make a more enticing and safe home for them.
Final words of advice: Don’t feed a non-neutered or non-spayed females unless you’re prepared to take them to the vet to have them fixed. If you don’t, they’ll destroy the peace of the colony (and it’s not their fault). If you do, they might adopt you for life… It’s a tough choice.
Don’t allow any cat to claim a territory that is an exit/entrance to the inner space, especially non-neutered males. They claim exit/entrance spaces to strategically control traffic and to raise themselves up within the pecking order. Only YOU should be controlling the pecking order, and it’s up to you to keep these pathways open. So block the paths off with whatever you cant to prevent camping. This kind of camping will only result in attacks against peaceful cats who were just coming in for a little food and affection.
In addendum:
I moved out of the hotel and into the top level of my house, a self contained apartment. Here I lay on a foam mattress, trying to keep my wifi connected from where the router sits in the cats’ nest. I don’t know if there was one stress factor that pushed me over the edge, but I had to be put on heart medication to control my blood pressure and heart rate. I’m 48. Hopefully this will pass. And my dreams at night have already turned to normal. All of the cats are fine and I no longer need to wake up at 5am for the long drive to arrive to serve breakfast as they expect. The Calico and The Persian still practice killing each other every morning; my favorite part of the day.
This will be a long story, perhaps too long for most readers. But here I go…
I bought a house on an island and embarked on a 2 year plan to have it renovated. The semi-feral mother, White Kitty, brought her kittens down from the woods and quickly moved them into the engine block of my car, rendering the car useless for several weeks. Eventually we sorted that out and the 5 kittens (all spayed and neutered now) grew very fond of us.
Then the destruction and construction work began on the house at the end of the high tourist season (mid September), by necessity due to the law of no loud works to be done before season’s end. The house has a tiny detached ‘summer kitchen’ which is about the size of a small dorm room, with a similar sized patio and it also has a bathroom - too small for 2 people, but I could stay there and take care of the cats while my girlfriend lived on the mainland during the construction phase (7 months). I love these cats (except 1) and I wasn’t going to allow them to turn feral and suffer without food and shelter over the winter. So I committed myself to be there for them everyday. It seemed like a sensible plan.
In the interest of brevity I’m going to advance the story 3 months, to the point after the cats moved into the summer kitchen for warmth and comfort. They were sleeping above me, below me, and all around me. By the end of these 3 months I had become sleep deprived and to a degree, malnourished. They wouldn’t let me eat without wanting to taste the food first, so I had to hide to eat anything. And with 8 cats surrounding you while you’re trying to sleep, there’s always one who is cleaning itself and making noise loud enough to wake you up. With 8 cats this happens at least every 30 minutes throughout the night. Then it takes 15 minutes to get back to sleep before the next cat decides to start cleaning itself. At the end of 3 months I had to surrender the summer kitchen to the cats and move into the nearest hotel, 30 minutes away. I now currently leave from the hotel at 6:30am every morning to arrive at the house for the 7am feeding/breakfast. I stay until about 3pm, then return to the hotel.
How did I go from a litter of 5 kittens and their mother to a full-on colony of cats? When the tourist season ended, cats who had homes (or feeding stations) became very hungry and could only survive the winter by eating insects and a birds, if they were lucky. White Kitty’s 5 kittens (now young cats) attracted attention from other cats.
The first wave of feral cats to apply for refugee status were: Sick Kitty, Little Guy, Weird Gray and Brown Cat.
Sick Kitty:
A large black and white cat who would run for his life if I made a sudden movement. His eyes were almost fully crusted over and had cataracts. His ears were bald and sorely pink. Over weeks of coaxing he established a small perch that was his territory. Watching me and the other cats show affection towards each other finally broke him, and he approached me for a chin rub and back scratch. That’s when his purr mechanism kicked in for perhaps the first time in a very long time. It made the sound of misfiring piston engine, but eventually his purr came on-line and continued to work nicely . It’s possible that I was the only human to ever touch him. Being petted was his new favorite thing in the world. But Sick Kitty wasn’t very well socialized and didn’t know how to play. The other kittens tried very hard to show him that playing doesn’t equal pretending to kill kill kill the other cat, but he couldn’t get it - he had two left feet in that dance.
In about a month, Sick Kitty had most of the fur return to his ears. His crusty eyes improved a lot because he had more time to clean himself rather than desperately look for food, as before. He had some troubling signs of territorial aggression when another cat would enter his space. This is when I began formulating the ‘non-aggression principle’ with new refugees.
I went out of town for 2 nights, and when I came back to the summer kitchen, Sick Kitty was gone. And he has not returned.
Little Guy:
He arrived about the same time as Sick Kitty and the other first-wave ferals. He is 100% the sole survivor of White Kitty’s third litter, the other one that we couldn’t find. He was very healthy and had near identical markings of WK’s other kittens. but he was younger. He was totally feral and could not be approached. He enjoyed feeding times and always had a gentle curious stare, but there was no reaching him. He would sit and look at me, but if I moved he would dart off. One day, he was just gone and hasn’t returned.
Weird Gray:
I’m 98% certain WG was the soul survivor from WK’s first litter (the first one we couldn’t find). His markings are less certain than Little Guy’s, but a very close match to the other Fab 5 kittens. Weird Gray wasn’t even gray, he was/is a brown and white tabby. Somehow we attached gray to the name of this weird cat, and it stuck. He was called ‘weird’ because he has 2 speeds: stalking and running; slow and fast. His version of play was highly aggressive and more domineering than anything else. He is lean and all muscle with a very intense stare. He submitted to me quickly, rolling on his back in a plea to join the colony. Being WK’s son afforded him many passes on his aggression toward the Fabulous 5. I thought he would come around and settle down and learn how to play like the others… I was wrong.
Eventually I had to trap him to be neutered to calm him down. He had too much testosterone in his system and I could see in his eyes that he didn’t want to attack the other cats, but he just had to do it and it was out of his control. It took a month or so for the excess testosterone to leave his system, and now he has a role within the colony - that of defender of the colony, which is a very useful role. At least he doesn’t defend the colony from the actual colony members anymore… And he has deep and beautiful eyes, and loves to be petted.
Brown Cat:
BC is probably the oldest living cat on the island, and somehow he found me. I fed him along with the new arrivals and that locked him in to the colony - really locked him in. When he showed signs of aggression to the other cats I banned him on the ‘non-aggression principle’. For two weeks I used the spray bottle to chase him off. He wouldn’t leave and was always orbiting the summer kitchen. At the end of two weeks he stumbled into the kitchen and flopped down. He was totally unafraid of my spray bottle wrath and laid down to signal: ‘Kill me or feed me, and you’re going to do one or the other right now’… So he beat me. He won the war, not just the battle. I didn’t know how to deal with anything like this level of determination, so I fed him until he couldn’t eat anymore. I have limits.
But Brown Cat had/has a few medical issues. He has a growth on his lower lip, like a tumor that prevents him from eating properly. He sucks food in and his tongue is elongated. He uses his paws like spoons to scoop food into his mouth, resulting in a mess every time I feed him. He’s the leading cause of why I go through so many rolls of paper towels.
Brown Cat’s aggression towards other cats ended after he surrendered in near starvation. So he got many passes on his other problem - stealing food from other cats’ bowls. It didn’t matter if another cat had the identical food, he needed to eat their food. So the other cats would move to his food bowl and it became like musical chairs. This behavior caused many feeding problems… But there was another problem - BC has chronic nasal discharge, resulting in wet sneezing everywhere at anytime. He has a bulbous nose which I think comes from a bite or scratch across the bridge that resulted with a solidified abscess. He would sneeze into other cats’ faces or into the dry cat food bowl. He is basically snot everywhere all the time that steals food. But thankfully he wasn’t contagious.
Please keep in mind that everything happening above is taking place while my house (10 feet away from the summer kitchen) is being gutted and modified. Crews arrive everyday, plumbers and electricians and delivery trucks and guys who drill into things and use jackhammers. Just when you think the noise couldn’t get any louder they bring in another jackhammer and another guy who drills into things. And then the foreman comes into the kitchen to ask me something and all the cats scatter for their lives - the delicate peace I’ve worked all day to achieve, shattered like a feline hand grenade. It explodes at least once a week… Sometimes that cats look at me with the expression, ‘What have I got myself into?’, and I look back at them with the same expression. There’s some solidarity in that exchange and an extra cat treat helps ease the pain (and a shot of whiskey for me). But there are times that they look at you and you need to keep your cool: the sudden loud sound events. They look at me to find out if they should run. I made several mistakes with this in the beginning, and the solution to this is to blink slowly at them say a few words to in a very soft tone - do not move your head or hands since they can interpret this is a signal to bolt.
A CHALLENGER APPEARS… The Calico Kitten Story
About 1 kilometer from my house is a communal trash bin area. Cats hang out there looking for food. If I have some extra food, I’ll stop and feed the bin kitties. One day I was quietly feeding the bin kitties and I heard a meow from behind me. I turned to see a calico kitten who looked to be about 10 - 12 weeks old sitting on a stone wall. I had an extra packet of wet food and went over to put on a spot where she could eat. She ran off. But I could see her looking at me from the bushes. I put the food down and she climbed back up to eat it. Then I drove home. End of story… no.
From the trash bins to my house is a labyrinth of roads. You can’t find it unless you know where it is, or you follow someone. And follow someone she did. 3 or 4 days after that bin feeding, a calico head appeared from behind to the flu of the summer kitchen’s outdoor oven. She had followed my car over several days while I went to and from town. She had no idea how far she would have to go to find me, but took a leap of faith in a decision of complete determination… That’s all you have to do with me: I love you!
The other colony members we not as happy as me to see her. They jumped her in, or perhaps were trying to jump her out. She had the growl of a cat 10 times her size and I can only imagine how she found that voice; a survivor. After a couple of days I was able to get her alone in the kitchen while the other cats were away. Her bonding to me happened in that time - the ‘you’re my new mommy’ trance-like gaze that lasted about 30 second (very intense). When the other cats returned I needed to communicate to them that I’ve adjusted the pecking order, and the Calico Kitten was now at the top of it (for the time being, until she gets her footing) and she should not be touched. I did this by creating a new perch that was closest to the feeding area that was for her only and I would feed her first. They picked up on this quickly and the attacks stopped, but they would still pounce in her general direction and there were some other negotiations going on in cat language. I would do what I call ‘love bombing’ sessions with the Calico in order to display her status to the other cats. These sessions would last about 5 minutes several times a day and I would make sure the other cats could see it. Of course, I didn’t reduce my affection/attention exchange time with the other cats in order to not make them jealous of the Calico, but the Calico received more of my time for her safety. This time was also the beginning of the winter freeze and she didn’t have the body mass to deal with the cold. I needed to wrap her in a little blanket every morning, like a sausage to stop her shivering.
It wasn’t long before she discovered that the summer kitchen also had an interior space - the dorm sized room with a mattress and other perches to sleep on. And most importantly, an electric space heater which is on 24 hours a day. On the first night that she stayed in the room (where myself and other cats were sleeping) she stared at the space heater like it was a god. I worried that she was going to burn her nose. She worshiped the space heater for several nights. It was the cutest thing that has ever happened in the history of life on Earth. I could argue that statement in front of the United Nations and they would have no choice but to make an official declaration that this was the cutest thing that has ever happened in known history. They would give me a gold-plated plaque with the inscribed declaration and I would hang that plaque above Calico Kitty’s feeding perch.
In a week or so the other cats fully accepted her into the colony. She enjoys attacking the tips of the tails of cats who are walking by, and then she quickly retreats as if nothing ever happened. She found her paw-of-doom and uses it gently, unless you are a paper towel ball - in that case, you don’t stand a chance. She still retreats to safety after the initial melee attack on a menacing paper towel ball, but she soon returns to serve justice and restore order to the kitchen by ripping it to shreds. The other cats just watch her playing and some of them join in, unlocking their inner kitten.
From the day she arrived I knew this time would come. Males outnumber females here by 5 to 1. I was hoping for more time, but at 20+ weeks old she began emitting pheromones and the two non-neutered males (Black & White Cat [who I will describe later] and Brown Cat) started taking a special interest in the Calico Kitty. She wasn’t actually in-heat and enjoyed the seemingly friendly attention. But I felt like the father of a teenage daughter who was being groomed for sex by two gnarly dudes, and I was also feeding and housing those perverts! But of course, I didn’t blame the dudes for their normal and natural behavior. Better these guys than some strange cat. At least the dudes understand what ’no’ means, and I never witnessed any attempts by them to mount her.
Spaying the Calico: It took a week to plan. I can’t pick her up, so she needed to be trapped. I own a steel cat trap cage that I used to trap one of the other cats to be neutered and when the steel door crashed down the sound triggered him into a somersaulting panic… The Calico would need to be gently coaxed into the cage, with me holding the door and quietly closing it behind her. I lined the cage with soft fabric. I trained her to enter the cage to get treats with me holding the door up so that on trap-day she wouldn’t be concerned about the presence of my hand above the cage. The bait in trap-day was fresh anchovies that she had never tasted before. I gave her half of an anchovy at first and let that sink in. In a moment after that she realized she must have more and a silly cage wasn’t going to stand in her way. So I led her into the cage with the other half of he tiny fish, and I got her. If you ever do the anchovy maneuver, keep them in an airtight container because if the other cats get a slight whiff of this fish it can ruin you plan. Distract the other cats with treats while you’re trying to trap a single cat.
The plan to catch the Calico Kitty was intense and every move was thought out and rehearsed in my mind. The only thing that didn’t go according to plan turned out to be inconsequential. I’ll save you from all of the details, but she recovered like a champion. The only sticking point was the prescription of antibiotic pills seemed to have a side-effect that made her face and ears twitch. Since I didn’t know if she was having an allergic reaction, I kicked her off of the medication (the meds weren’t doctor’s orders, I had to ask him to give me the prescription). In 2 days she was back to protecting the kitchen from paper towel balls, like a superheroine.
I obsessed so much over the plan to spay the Calico because one of the female cats that we had spayed a year before (the mother of the Fab 5) almost died after the operation. She began bleeding and we needed to rush her back to the vet in the middle of the night. While spaying and neutering cats remember: it’s a lot harder for the girls to recover. It’s a deep abdominal operation that can have serious complications if treated casually. Older female cats take longer to recover.
ANOTHER CHALLENGER APPEARS, The Persian Kitten (and the deep freeze):
At 8 to 10 weeks old she seemed too young to be separated from her mother. But there she was: two big green eyes surrounded by black fluff and strangely stubby. She suffered the same jumping-in persecution as the Calico Kitten, but her timing was bad. She arrived the day before temperatures dropped to -7c, plus high wind. The other cats would not allow her to stay in the summer kitchen, and thankfully she managed to find access to an outdoor utility closet on the other side of the house. At least she was out of the wind.
If you’re not familiar with very cold temperatures, the difference between 0c and -7c doesn’t feel too dramatic. The big difference is in the physics - at 0c, a bowl of water can last all night a only the surface will be a bit frozen. At -7c, that same bowl of water freezes solid in 15 minutes. In 5 minutes the surface will be frozen hard.
Everything was frozen, including the pipes (so no flowing water). Cat food was frozen to the bowls and in the sink. I put dry food out for the Persian near her closet. She would meow so I tried to leave a packet of wet food out for her to see if she could eat it before it froze. It froze. The next morning the frozen food was gone. Overnight she ate a 100 gram packet of solidly frozen meat in frozen gravy, and she only weighed about 1 kilogram.
The freeze started to impact my mind. When I finally figured out that placing the cats’ water bowl inside of the summer kitchen would prevent the water from freezing - it felt to me like the moment when Einstein first discovered life on Mars.
The Persian’s jumping-in lasted 4 of the coldest days in over 9,000 years of recorded history. I didn’t think she was going to survive the freeze. On a few occasions I was able to slow-blink with her and then we were both on a mission to bond before things got worse. Finally the other cats were asleep or doing other things and we had our moment. Unlike the bonding gaze with the Calico, the Persian simply rolled over on her back when I got close to her and I could pet her immediately. I moved her into the kitchen but she didn’t have her own feeding perch that would allow me to display her inclusion in the colony to the other cats. So she would position herself be between my feet and then sit on my shoe, and that’s where I would feed her. Her personality won everyone over very quickly. The other cats were soon smelling her and bumping heads. She has a calm nature and is well socialized. I suspect that she had other siblings but somehow got separated. The Calico has become her new sister and they try to kill each other everyday when they’re not murdering paper towel balls. The Persian has advanced play skills and can play with the Fab 5 as if she was from their same litter. Her tail shakes like a rattlesnake when she’s happy, and she purrs by just looking at her.
She’s next for the visit to the vet, I just hope I get 3 more weeks before the dudes start following her around. In 3 weeks I can move into the top portion of my home which is a separate unit from the main house. I can move out of the hotel and end the commute and various other related stresses that have me pouring whiskey into my coffee, or downing a beer before the crews arrive at 7:30am.
TICKS! (Why did it have to be ticks?)
The cats don’t get fleas. They have mites that get under your skin but if you remember to wash your hands after a love-bombing session it’s not a big problem. They get ticks, though, and I hate ticks. When I was 5 years old my father told me that ticks can eat through my shoe if I step on one. The only creatures in the world who deserved to be killed on sight are mosquitos and ticks. At any given time at least one of the cats will have a tick on its neck. The cats move around too much for me to use tick tweezers to pull the tick out completely. The one time I managed to get the head out, the wound bled and then formed a pea-sized abscess that thankfully healed.
What works for me is to gently pluck (not pull) the abdomen to intentionally leave the head in the skin. It kills the tick and the head keeps the wound closed until the cat’s skin heals behind it and pushes the head out in about a week. But I have to be careful not to pull a clump of fur out with the tick abdomen or the cat will scratch at the irritation and a little bald spot will into a big bald spot. I know this is not the recommended treatment for ticks, but other than leaving the ticks to feed on the cats I don’t know what else to do. Perhaps tick medication… but I would have to routinely medicate 10 cats when only about 1 has a tick at any given time. I’d go through tick medication almost as fast as I go through cat food (and that’s the fastest speed in the Universe).
DOES THE CRAZY CAT LADY HAVE CATS BECAUSE SHE’S CRAZY, OR IS SHE CRAZY BECAUSE SHE HAS CATS?
In conclusion:
I didn’t ask for this, but I am responsible for creating the situation. Mistakes were made, but the good times outweigh the bad times. I love cats, but I’m not the Cat Man (as the builders secretly refer to me). Cats were bred to be among humans and there is a duty of care we should all have towards them (or at least something approaching that).
When the house is completed and the builders all gone, I’m going to build an Ewok Village for the colony among the many pine trees on the property. I want to move them out of the summer kitchen and try to make a more enticing and safe home for them.
Final words of advice: Don’t feed a non-neutered or non-spayed females unless you’re prepared to take them to the vet to have them fixed. If you don’t, they’ll destroy the peace of the colony (and it’s not their fault). If you do, they might adopt you for life… It’s a tough choice.
Don’t allow any cat to claim a territory that is an exit/entrance to the inner space, especially non-neutered males. They claim exit/entrance spaces to strategically control traffic and to raise themselves up within the pecking order. Only YOU should be controlling the pecking order, and it’s up to you to keep these pathways open. So block the paths off with whatever you cant to prevent camping. This kind of camping will only result in attacks against peaceful cats who were just coming in for a little food and affection.
In addendum:
I moved out of the hotel and into the top level of my house, a self contained apartment. Here I lay on a foam mattress, trying to keep my wifi connected from where the router sits in the cats’ nest. I don’t know if there was one stress factor that pushed me over the edge, but I had to be put on heart medication to control my blood pressure and heart rate. I’m 48. Hopefully this will pass. And my dreams at night have already turned to normal. All of the cats are fine and I no longer need to wake up at 5am for the long drive to arrive to serve breakfast as they expect. The Calico and The Persian still practice killing each other every morning; my favorite part of the day.
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I am so very sorry for your loss. Yes you did the right thing. Better to pass away in familiar surroundings than a strange noisy place. So very sad though. It will take time to feel better. Allow the tears to flow otherwise if you stuff the emotions-it will pop out unexpectedly when you least need to shed tears-just let them flow. I hope in time the memories bring a smile to your face-you are a good person and go over and above what others do for animals. Don't stop caring. Sending you hugs! 
