Cat Scratch Fever

For a few months, there have been a couple of stray cats living under our house. This was fine for a while but it came to a head when Aliyah came home one night to this:
It's not clear, but this is two cats humping. Aliyah yelled at them. She stomped her foot. They were unfazed. They kept humping. (I wish we had video!)

For the uninitiated, a male cat’s penis is barbed. This is what it looks like:
Awesome and scary.

So... When my parents came out a few months ago, my Dad did a great job of putting screens over the ventilation holes and access points under the house. But there were a few places he couldn’t get to. And one of those places was good for stray cats. In my very Irish way, I ignored the problem until this happened:My friend Jennifer... ...is a feral cat specialist. She’s pretty hot, right? You should buy her album at www.greene-house.com

In LA, there is a network of people who specialize in wild cat colonies. The upside of them is that a few feral cats hanging around do a great job of keeping the rodent population to zero. Environmentally friendly + zero maintenance = The Best of All Worlds.

Downside: Two cats = 100 cats in less than 1 year. Why? Cats care less about incest than the FLDS.

So.... here is one more equation: Cats humping on front steps + Cats don’t stop humping when Aliyah yells at them + Seamus must defend house from cat urine smell = Seamus calls Jennifer for advice. It turns out Jennifer has cat traps. They’re very ingenious. The cat, tempted by food, steps on a trigger plate, and a wire gate falls. So...

Wednesday about 3:00 of the clock... Jokingly, I say to Lesley (my boss) “Hey, we’re done. Let’s go home!” She says “I don’t need you for anything else. Feel free.” While feeling slightly hurt that my boss has just called me useless, I remember Jennifer and I had talked earlier in the week and while she wanted me to catch he cats, but she also wanted her cat traps back sooner rather than later because an alpha female at her colony had given birth for the 50th time this year. So I said to Lesley: “Okay, I’m going to go and catch those gosh-darn pesky cats.”

It didn’t work out well. Here’s the breakdown:

4:30

I put in plenty of food. As Jennifer had coached me, I had not put out food the night before.











4:45





I put out extra food now. I still feel bad for lying to the Pet Co guy who was trying to up-sell me the bigger bag of food. I told him “I’m buying the smaller bag because my cats are all Hollywood: they have a print ad shoot with Kate Moss on Tuesday.” Which is sadder: He was okay with me starving cats or he understood Kate Moss would only be photographed with anorexic cats?

5:30 - No cats
















6:30 - No cats

About this time I remembered cats are nocturnal. I felt stupid for leaving work early. This picture is taken through a screen. That’s why it looks like a lame Grateful Dead album cover.








7:30 - still no cats

By now I had gotten to the 3 level on Nintendo Wii’s “Red Steel.” I started to worry the cats were scared by my samurai skills.









8:30 - Success!

The female took the bait. She did not cry. Following Jennifer’s advice, I took her into the back yard and put her on a raised surface with a towel over her. I guess cats are like little children that way: they think that towel or a blanket is monster armor; or if that they can’t see monsters, monsters can’t get them.



Meow, monsters, meow.

After she was secure, I went back to the front porch to clean up the spilled kitty kibble, but the male was “hiding” (poorly) around the corner of the steps. Here’s a picture of him through the beveled glass on the front door:


He’s the gray-ish blob near the bottom. He’s eating the spilled kibble. I called Aliyah and whispered to her: “Your not coming home soon, right?” That came out the wrong way. After a long whispered explanation of why I didn’t want her to come home, I looked out the door again. He wasn’t going for it, so I went back to “Red Steel.”


By the way, the Nintendo Wii is excellent. That having been written: we had a little trouble at first. We bought was a Japanese unit. Yes: Japanese. All of the directions looked like PickUp sticks. So I called the help line. Brian, my Help Line Guy, had no idea why or how that could happen; which is disappointing because apparently it is well known that the demand in North America was high enough that Nintendo diverted a large number of units from Japan to America. If that happened, of course there would be a few units the don’t get the hard drives switched out. What is also disappointing is that Brian told me that I had to talk to he retailer about this problem.

1. The instructions from the Wii specifically say if there is a problem, do NOT take it back to the retailer and
2. the problem was caused by Nintendo diverting Wiis to another market and they
   
1. didn’t take ownership and
2. didn't inform their customer service people this might be a problem.

But anyway, I got another the next day and I have a new found love for tennis, and Aliyah and I are talking about putting the Wii in a bigger room so I stop hitting her in the face when I use my back-hand return.

I still needed to catch the male. I ignored Jennifer’s advice about putting only dry food as bait. It’s practical advice - you don’t want stinky cat food spilling everywhere - but I suspected that the male had seen what had happened to the female and I needed to sweeten the pot, so I added some of this:














9:30 - Still no cat.
Around this time Aliyah came home.














10:30 - Still no cat.


Aliyah began to claim I loved the Wii more than her. I chopped the head off an evil Samurai. She said we should watch the new episode of “Rescue Me.”








11:30 - Still no cat.















Around 12:00 midnight we’re watching the end of “Rescue Me” when I hear the crunching of cat kibble. I give Aliyah the signal (licking my paws like the drummer from Kiss) and whisper “This pussy is all mine!” Then something went wrong. Before I had a chance to look out the window I heard the gate shut, but when I looked outside he wasn’t in the trap. All I saw was this:

I don’t know what happened. The trap tripped early. The male got out. Maybe the newspaper I used to line the cage was too heavy; too much newspaper - and when he stepped halfway in the extra half ounce of pressure caused the gate to fall early? Regardless, he looked at me for a while, then sat at the end of my driveway for a half hour.


Then he walked off and never came back. I haven’t seen him since.

The next morning I got up early and there was still no male cat in the second trap. So I put some newspaper and a garbage bag on my back seat, and woke her up and drove her over to my friend Stephanie’s work.





This is Stephanie and her boyfriend Jeremiah. He works in the one part of the booming LA theater world that makes money: doing tech work. He will build you a set so fast you won’t know your Lorca from your Wilder. Stephanie is a veterinarian's assistant. Also, she likes to brag about how her dad can beat up Jean Claude Van Damme. I’m not convinced that is a bragging point. What I think is brag-worthy is she has a 20 years old cat that looks like it is 10, so she knows how to take care of animals. She also has a parrot that hates men.

The people at Century Vet are awesome, no hassle, I-know-my-shit take-no-prisoners. Unless those prisoners are feral cats trapped in cages in which case it is their job to take the prisoners and cut their gonads off. In zero time they took this female, operated, and returned her to me.

The end of this story is uneventful because I was dealing with other things the night she was returned. But I can't let this entry go out on a low note, so here's an awkward segue. When she was fixed, she was pregnant. Speaking of the unborn - here’s a picture of Patrick’s 3rd child:


Congratulations to Pat and Tanis. Tanis is three months pregnant. What was going on 3 months ago? Oh yeah...
I'm glad you guys had a productive weekend too.