For those of you who haven’t read the previous post, here’s the backstory: a few weeks ago, my wife and I found a stray cat and her litter of newborn kittens in our backyard. I felt that I couldn’t let them stay there, but I feared that they would be euthanized if I brought them in to a shelter. Many commenters chimed in with wonderful suggestions and advice.

When I got back from my trip on Friday, the situation was unchanged: the mother and her kittens were still in the backyard, and I was still conflicted about what to do about them. Upon mac’s advice, I had contacted a few “no-kill” shelters. But it was difficult to find one that had room. Kitty Cottage, for instance, which I had deemed my best hope, told me that they couldn’t accept the cats.

I went back to the PACCA to rent a trap. I ran into a distraught man in who arrived cradling a small box in his hands. At one time, it had contained contractor garbage bags; now, it held a tiny kitten who could barely breathe. The man had found it on his construction site among a litter of deceased siblings. But PACCA couldn’t help — the man was told that the shelter could not accept the kitten because it was under two pounds (this is a shelter policy that I’ll discuss in further detail in a later post).

Two women, who had arrived carrying cages full of white rats, gave him the phone number of a woman in the area who bottle-feeds and rehabilitates sick and stray kittens. Then, they got into a heated argument with a man who told them that he feeds rats to his pet snake. The women, it turned out, run a rat rescue, and had come to the shelter to have their rats spayed. They seemed to know their way around the shelter scene, so I asked them what they thought I should do. They agreed that I should trap and turn in the cats — and that the PACCA was the right place to bring them. “It’s full of good people,” they told me.

So I rented the trap, came home. I put a small plate of food at one end of the trap, and went inside my house. I saw the mother enter the trap, but she managed to avoid pressing the step-lever which would close the front of the trap — she simply stood before it, and craned her head over the step to get at the food.

I opened the door, and the cat got nervous. As she turned around to get out of the trap, she mistakenly stepped on the lever, and the front door snapped shut.

It was a horrible moment. The cat, realizing that she had been trapped, backed frenetically towards the front of the long cage and lashed out at the steel barriers. She let out several loud, fearful moans. She would stay very still, and then spring at one of the walls of the cage, as if she could startle it into opening.

I spoke soothing words to her, but I didn’t know whether to believe them. Was everything going to be okay? Would she be taken care of? Or was she right to feel that a door had just shut her away from the life, freedom, and love that she had known?

I couldn’t answer those questions, but I had to get the kittens. They proved difficult to capture, but I eventually got all four of them in a box, and headed off to the PACCA with a heavy heart.

To be continued . . .

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