here kitty kitty

Once again, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I really shouldn’t be posting right now because I have two papers to write, but this story had to be told.

So for the past couple of weeks, this cat has been hanging out on our porch – we will call it Porch Kitty. There are quite a few strays in our neighborhood, so no big deal. Porch Kitty would just come sit on our wicker couch and mind it’s own business. We didn’t feed it or anything, it just kept coming back.

Then one day, inexplicably, it started trying to come into the house whenever we opened the front door. This of course led to several spirited cat chases throughout our house. Fortunately, our house is small, so we just closed all the bedroom doors and lured it out of the house with pieces of turkey. Still, not really a big deal.

We started to feel sorry for PK when the nights turned cold. It would paw against our window and meow. And if that doesn’t pull at your heartstrings, then you are dead inside. Now, we knew not to bring it in the house, but we figured if it was going to hang out whether we fed it or not, then we might put a box and some towels on the porch to help it stay warm, and maybe a little food.

Then my roommate started thinking about having to deal with a dead frozen cat on our porch, so she decided to try out the box idea. So yesterday, she made said box and put it out on the porch. But she was afraid PK wasn’t going in, so she called her boyfriend. He was coming by the house anyway, so he decided to try and get the cat to go in the box. And it bit him. Yeah, not good. Very big deal now.

He starts to freak out that he might have rabies. (This cat has no tags, no evident owner in the neighborhood, so rabies is not out of the question.) Rabies is certainly not something to mess with… you wait until symptoms show, and you will die. So my roommate calls animal control today. They came by tonight and set up a cage to try to trap the cat so it can be tested.

About half an hour later, we hear the trap catch. We are sad, and we feel really horrible. Because the cat was cute and nice, we thought, and even if it doesn’t have rabies, it probably couldn’t be domesticated, so they would have to put it to sleep. Then we look in the trap… it’s the wrong cat. Crap.

Now we’re afraid that animal control is going to come pick up the wrong cat. So instead of calling animal control or leaving them a note like normal people, we decide to figure out how to open the cage and let the cat out. Because we are Tech nerds. But this is not as easy as it sounds. The cage is old and rusty and the porch is not well-lit. To give a basic picture of how the cage works: one side is the side that the cat comes in to get at the food inside. Once it reaches the other side, it steps on a metal plate that triggers the door to shut on the side it came in. The other side has a latch at the bottom that holds the door shut, once it is unlatched, the doors pulls up and the cat can get out. Of course, it took us about 20 minutes to figure all of this out.

First, we had to figure out the latched side, so we could let the wrong cat out. But we didn’t want it to freak out and bite us, so we used the only hand protection we had: rubber dishwashing gloves and an oven mitt. It take a few minutes and a few cat freak-outs, but we get the door open, and that cat hauled ass. Not that I blame it of course.

Now that wrong cat is gone, we have to figure how to reset the cage so that we can catch PK so that boyfriend can stop freaking out. This takes several more minutes. We finally figure out how to get the entrance door up, but can’t figure out how to get it to stay up. While we are trying to figure this out, PK slinks up and scares the crap out of us. We go inside the house because we don’t want to get bitten. But we know we have to go back out or the cat will eat all the food around the cage and we won’t be able to catch it. But we have to get the cat away from the cage. I get a piece of turkey and lure the cat away. After a couple frantic minutes we get the cage door to stay open. Whew.

We go inside, and after a few minutes, I look out the window. PK is about halfway into the cage, but then changes its mind and back out. Then it sees me and comes over to the window. It’s been hanging out on the porch since then… not going in the cage. I think its on to us.