Tom chose us

We live in town, but in a neighborhood that was a suburb of the city before it was annexed a hundred years ago. Our street was generally built out in the early 1950’s, and leans heavily toward midcentury ranch houses – but plan book houses for ordinary people, not anything like you would see in Dwell magazine.

The lots are large for city lots – ours is ½ acre, and is on the smaller side of average. A neighbor down the street has three acres. The lots are wooded, with fifty foot tall pines and oaks and magnolias everywhere. And also, stray cats.

Our neighborhood has a pretty severe feral cat problem. It’s a combination of negligent pet owners, biology (cats have LOTS of kittens) and lack of a proper animal control office in our city. There are no easy solutions on a policy scale, but on an individual scale, it’s pretty simple: trap the ferals and get them fixed, and then release them back in your yard. It’s simple, but not cheap – a spay or neuter can easily cost you $250, and that would be cheap. It’s not all that easy either, as you have to hunt to find vets that will work on ferals, you have to trap them, and you have to have space for them to recover for 24 hours at a minimum.

But, if you can swing it, it works. The now sterile cat keeps the territory safe from other cats, and she (or he) will live in your neighborhood for years without making new kittens. It breaks the cycle.

We first noticed Tom over the winter of 23/24. A large orange cat who would come up on our deck and eat the food we put out for the ferals (so we can trap them), we saw him first on the security cameras. At the time, we were working on adopting out a set of kittens another feral had had in our backyard, and one of those kittens was a straight up ginger, so we assumed this was the father. I called him Tom, because some 80% of gingers are male.

I would see Tom in the back yard sometimes, but always at a distance, and I would chide him for neglecting his parental duties. I would tell him that it was irresponsible to go arund getting other cats pregnant and then not sticking around.

Tom was unphased, and would duck into the hedgerow when I approached.

But one day, I stumbled across a batch of kittens, just a few days old, in a hollow tree stump in our backyard, the second batch we had found that summer. Mom was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean they had necessarily been abandoned. Momma cats rarely abandon kittens unless they are obviously damaged or dying. It was far more likely she was just off hunting.

If you are going to rescue kittens, it is so much easier, by several orders of magnitude, if you can trap the mom too. Because then you don’t have to feed the kittens every 3 hours for six weeks – you just have to feed Mom, and she does all the hard work.

 So, we set a trap for her, using the kittens as bait. You put the kittens in a pet carrier, then put the trap in front of it, and cover the whole thing in a blanket, leaving the mouth of the trap exposed. The momma cat smells her kittens, and to her mind, they have been moved to the end of a tunnel. She goes into the tunnel to explore, and BAM! The trap closes.

So now we had four ginger kittens and, surprise, a Ginger mom, our old friend Tom, who we had been misgendering all this time.

For the next six weeks, we would feed Tom and the kittens, who all lived in our garage storage room. We would go in and put food in the bowl, and Tom would hiss at us. By the end of the six weeks or so, when she began weening the kittens, her nipples sore and achy, she would tolerate our presence as we played with the kittens, but if you approached her, more hissing and screaming at us.

It was almost September when we got Tom to the vet and got her spayed. Two days later we released her back into the backyard, exactly where we had trapped her almost two months before. She darted from the trap and back into the hedgerow, free at last.

Two days later she was back on our back deck, eating the feral cat food. We would see her from time to time, sunning herself in the yard. We learned she slept at night in our flower bed.

And then one day, she started showing up when we were putting the food out. She would sit at the other end of the deck and watch us, and then run up to the bowl when we walked away.

And then she started sitting two feet away from us as we filled the bowl.  And then, sometime early this year, nearly two years after she had kittens in our backyard, she declared us safe, and now she rubs against our legs as we pour food in the bowl. She will follow us around as we water the plants on the deck. And, sometimes, she will allow me to pick her up and pet her. She looks a bit nervous, but she allows it, and then when I set her down, she doesn’t run away but will continue to rub against our legs.

She is on our deck most days now. She still sleeps in the flower bed out front, a permanent dead spot marking her shelter among the perennials. Every morning, she greets me when I leave the house, and will sometimes stand at the gate to the deck and fuss at me to open it, despite her being completely capable of getting over it herself, like she does countless times a day.

She’s a pet now, I guess; a permanent resident on our property. Outdoor cats are bad for the bird population, but we have modified things a bit to make it safer for the birds, like making sure there is clearance around water sources and that bird feeders are not just baiting them as a hunting hide for cats.

I would never choose an outdoor cat, but it seems like Tom has chosen us.

The other day, I saw her lying on the deck, sound asleep, belly up in the air. Cats bodies are most vulnerable underneath – they only show their stomach when they feel safest. And I guess for Tom, that space of safety is our back deck.

I’ve spent a large part of my career working with victims of trauma, and one thing I have learned is that you cannot heal from trauma while you are still experiencing trauma – you have to have a safe space to heal.

I’m glad we are able to be that space for Tom.