Sad Eyes II

  

   As you may recall, our neighborhood had a small issue yesterday. A cat has been wandering around for a few days, bedraggled and shy, wearing a flea collar
. It obviously had been someone’s pet but had fallen on hard times. Either it was lost, or someone had dumped it in our neighborhood. I don’t know which makes me more sad.

          I called our animal control officer, who dropped off a humane trap and provided us with advice and information. He’s a retired state environmental police officer but learning this gave me a moment’s pause when he pulled up in a huge Mercedes SUV and left it running and spewing emissions the full twenty minutes he was here. A nice man, though, who obviously cared about animals.

          One interesting theory from him:

          “Now I’m not sayin’ anything against possums, but you get one of them in your trap, don’t worry about the rabies. Rabies goes to the brain, but possums don’t get rabies ‘cause their brain is the size of a pea!”

          So off he roared and there I was with this giant trap and the vision of dealing with the endless parade of wildlife that would be trapped in my new cage. What had I been thinking? After the first flurry of neighborhood conversations, everyone else had gone off to their day and I was the one left holding the bag trap.

          Before long, though, we had another sighting. I rushed outside, covered the metal gridded floor of the trap with newspaper as instructed, put in a dish of tuna, and put it out in our yard.

          The cat ambled across the street.

          We then moved the trap over to the neighbor’s yard and what do you know? Within thirty seconds the cat went in the trap, the door swung shut, and voila!

          Well, that was easy.

          What came next was the hard part. What to do with it.

I covered the cage per my instructions.
"What you gotta do - and this is imperative -
is you gotta cover the cage. That way he'll
think he's in a cave or a den."
It sounded more like a recipe for a happy
fox than a housecat, but okay. 

          I called every rescue center, cat feral program, and nearby vet in what seemed like a fifty mile radius and no one could/would take it.

          I knew I couldn’t keep it because Satchel would never, at this stage of his long life, tolerate another cat.

          My husband and I finally drove him to the animal shelter in the city, and the three of us waited, the cat mewing sadly and looking up at us through the bars of his cage. We filled out paperwork, to include checking the box in which we choose NOT to know the outcome, and turned him over.

          We left a donation and went home with our empty cage.

          I don’t know how in the world people work at animal shelters.