Spring has arrived, and the owners have started letting their cats out. The cats roam the yards, yowling and marking everything around. There’s a terrible stench. Our front lawn has turned into some kind of arena. Cats regularly come here to determine who is stronger, whose urine smells more potent, and who really owns the lawn.
It’s useless to try to scare off cats. You can’t find their owners. Owners don’t put name tags on their cats. And even if they did, you could easily call the police and complain that the animal is being walked without a leash. A hefty fine, equivalent to the price of such a cat on a classifieds website.
After considering various options, a plan has been devised. (Do you have a plan, Mr. Fix?) A cat trap is purchased online. It turns out they sell such things. Valerian is bought at the pharmacy. A piece of bread, valerian, and a cat trap are set out on the lawn for the night. Voila, in the morning, a kitty is sitting in the trap. The kitty is taken out of the trap, sits in your lap, and gets petted. A bow with a note is tied around the kitty’s neck for the owners, so they don’t let the cat out again. If they do let it out, there’s a Plan B — shave a stripe on the cat’s back and release it. Plan C — simply let the cat go, but about 50 kilometers away from home. Plan D and so on.
In 4 days, we caught 4 cats. On the fifth day, late in the evening, a wild cat ended up in the cage. Unlike the others, it wasn’t sitting quietly, waiting for its fate; it was trying to break free. To handle the cat as mentioned above, I brought the cage into the house and let the cat roam in the guest bathroom. Morning is wiser than evening. The cat was clearly purebred. Beautiful, more blue than green, with interesting stripes that sometimes turned into spots. Such cats are sold for a lot of pesetas already sterilized, so it was quite surprising to see it among the other sexually mature males looking for fame and fortune on our lawn.
In the morning, I couldn’t pick up the cat. I mean, he hissed and lunged so much that the very idea of getting closer than a meter and a half was rejected by my basic instincts. I let him out of the bathroom into the hallway. He darted out, assessed the situation, and then squeezed back into the corner of the bathroom near the sink. The white walls of the bathroom were stained with paw prints up to a height of 2.5 meters. The little creature turned out to be very agile and clearly spent the night looking for a way out of the situation he found himself in.
I’m asking my daughter to help put a note around the cat’s neck. The plan is this: I’ll hold the cat still, and she will stretch the elastic band with the note. Then we’ll let the cat go. We’ve categorized the cat as a “mindless creature incapable of understanding the context,” so I figured that if we throw a blanket over it, we can pick it up easily.
That’s how it turned out. I threw a fleece blanket over the cat. The cat didn’t react at all. I mean, “brain-dead creature, unable to appreciate the context.” So I pinned him to the floor, trying to use one hand to find his head and pull it out from under the blanket. Just to let the cat breathe and attach a note.
But that wasn’t the case. The cat tried to resist. I held on tighter. He started to struggle even more, so I held on even tighter. In the end, I was sitting on top of him, holding him down with my legs, while I pressed his head to the floor with my hands. I was shouting to my daughter to hurry up and grab the note. The cat was screaming to be let go and showing off his three-centimeter fangs. Actually, he wasn’t just showing them; he was trying to use them against my daughter and her rubber band with the note. My daughter was screaming that she was scared and that she couldn’t put the rubber band around the cat’s neck because he was opening his mouth too wide.
The cat is wriggling and trying to break free. I hold it even tighter. Everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs, and then the cat realizes it’s being killed. A powerful stream of urine, followed by a strong torrent of feces, bursts out from under the blanket and splatters everything: the blanket, me, the bathroom walls, the floor, the toilet. The cat is screaming. I’m screaming. My daughter is screaming. Everything around is a mess.
At some point, they put a note on the cat, opened the front door, and let the cat out. The cat sprinted about five meters and then, with the note around its neck, trotted towards the exit of the residence.
It took several hours to clean the bathroom. The smell was something else. Yep, pheromones! All the cleaning products, bleach, everything was used. But the smell lingered. The blanket and my clothes went to the dry cleaner and were washed several times. The cat took revenge on us for everyone. Instead of just letting us put a note on him.
Dear cat, I think it’s purebred. The owners are unlikely to let him out now.
But it wasn’t even a month later that I saw that cat again. He didn’t come near our lawn this time, but I recognized him. Especially since our note was still hanging around his neck…
Uh…? What the… Okay, Google, what was that? As it turns out, it was a European wildcat. A wild creature from the wild forest. This cat had no owner at all and ended up in the urban area along with other synanthropic predators, like foxes, which are gradually adapting to urban spaces in search of food.
For a while, we were still in shock at the realization of our own foolishness and bravery. We actually managed to catch, and not just catch, but also put a collar on a wild beast that took the situation seriously and in a completely different context. In other words, we turned out to be the “mindless creatures incapable of understanding the context.”
The little cat is probably still wandering around with a waistband from some underwear for a collar, just as shocked by what happened.