I DEEPLY REGRET THE DAY I TOOK A CAT INTO MY HOME by a CAT TRAPPER

I deeply regret the day I took a cat into my home. I hope you will listen to what I have to say with an open mind so we can teach our children well. The multitude of cats I have brought into my home now and over the years is way, way more than I care to think about. It took a lot of money – testing, de-wormed, vaccinated, spayed/neutered (before there was Fix Nation), antibiotics, sometimes surgery, diagnosing exotic diseases, cat food, cat litter, cat boxes, cat beds, cat carriers, cat toys, cat scratching posts, the extra money I spent on tuna, roasted chicken, and ham while trying to relieve my guilt because I wasn’t spending as much time with my older ones as they wanted, the brand new $200 VCR that went crashing to the ground after using it twice, etc, etc, etc, etc. not to mention the space it took to house the cats and their equipment. We all know how much money it takes to support such an effort (certainly some more than others).And you can add cat traps and trapping equipment (rope, towels, cage covers, quilts, etc) to the list for the trappers. And you can add trap-making equipment to the list for me. But it definitely was much, much more than the money. Staying awake all night with a really sick kitten and having your boss be really angry that you keep falling asleep at work. Socializing them 24/7, making trips to the pet store to buy those often really heavy bags of litter and cat food, cleaning litter boxes until life no longer becomes worth living, washing a newcomer in the bathtub –along with his brothers and sisters of course – so that you can get them clean and keep your other cats from getting their fleas, getting bit and ending up in the emergency room and then followed by the pharmacy until the late hours of the night where you do not even have the energy to get out of the car or know what day of the week it is and you fall asleep with your head bent against the steering wheel as the drool fills your lap when once more – you wake up to feel that life is no longer worth living. Spending hour upon hour at adoptions after you have just emptied your car of all it’s contents only to fill it back up again with cat cages, cat carriers, cat litter boxes, water, food, paperwork. Having no time to spend with your family (that is – IF you were lucky enough to have a family before you went into cat rescue) because God only knows there is no time to get one now. Having your husband divorce you because he is so tired of the dirty house, the smell of cats, his paycheck going to the care of cats, sleeping on a bed of piss, never knowing where his wife is all hours of the day and night, having to build a cat house so he can try to eat a TV dinner without cat hair in it. Having no friends you can call when you need them because you lost your “normal” friends a long time ago and now only have cat friends who are way too busy and overwhelmed to even help themselves – much less you. Worrying about what is going to happen to your cats when you die because there is no one available with the resources or especially the time to take them. OK, so I could go on and on and on and on but I think everyone gets my drift. What if all the time we spent taking care of these cats was instead spent TRAPPING the cats for spay/neuter? We are chasing our tales here ladies (and gents). And what if all the money we spent buying cat litter, cat food, vet appts, etc. we spent on donations to Fix Nation or other facilities as needed to stay in business to spay/neuter? Certain trappers I know could have the whole west valley trapped BY THEMSELVES if they didn’t spend every hour of every day running around like crazy taking care of cats that are/were in their possession. I could get the whole east Valley and Ali could get the central valley. But we all spend so much of our time either taking care of our cats or the feral cats that we feed that there isn’t much time for anything else. If we had directed all our efforts into trapping, there would be a ton less cats in the world so we would not be seeing cats lying dead in the streets, hoarding situations on TV, poisoned cats by the millions, incomprehensible death rates in the shelters. Not to mention it has ruined my life as well as theirs. When I walk by their screen door and they look at me with the longing look of a cat that wants to run in the grass, climb the tree, and smell all the things there are to smell instead of a small room where they cannot run, a room that  smells like antiseptic (and my cats STILL get sick on a continual basis), and an always dirty litter box, I am crushed. The thing is this. How am I managing NOT to take any cats in now that I am full and overwhelmed. Could I not have managed this from the start? Think about it. I should have left them out there where they took their chances at life and death like all creatures on earth. And what ever time they had on this earth was spent doing what cats like to do. Instead I spend my time and money taking them to vets that almost always charge me $250 for blood work (and antibiotics) and proceed to tell me the cat has an infection…….da……………like what, I didn’t know? Or charge me $200 for an exam and blood work only to tell me my old cat is in renal failure and there is only palliative care available. Again…..da. Or that the x-ray on his limping leg shows nothing and to wait and see what happens. I could have bought a house several times over for all the worthless advice and “diagnosing” my vets have done. And I find myself chasing my tail for tons of illnesses that I have given them  due to all the new animals I have exposed them to. What was I thinking? What were all of us thinking? Ask Cyndi Zacko what kind of difference we made. A tiny blip on the radar of all the cats that get euthanized each year at the shelter. For all the thousands & hundreds of thousand dollars and thousands & thousands of hours we have spent on our cats, we could have been trapping thousands and thousands of cats so that there would not be any homeless animals out there to deal with. And poop. Think about dumping the poop in your cat litter box in your front yard every few days. It is no wonder they poison the cats at every opportunity. My girlfriend has very poor eyesight for which she is scheduled to have surgery in the near future. I got out of my car recently at her house and was absolutely horrified so see all the piles of poop in her front yard. I am frightened for the day she has her surgery because when her eyesight has improved enough that she can see all the poop, there will be hell to pay. And of course not all of it may be from the cats but who cares. Certainly not her. Poop is poop no matter who it is from and her yard is full of it. I am sure if I wasn’t feeding ferals on her sidewalk that there would not nearly be as many cats in her yard to fill it with poop. And let’s face the facts, for every feral cat we feed to save their lives, there are thousands more getting  poisoned because no one is out there trapping them and preventing them from multiplying. Trappers are very valuable people and not everyone can be a trapper. I do not know many trappers. We all, as trappers, should have left the care of cats to the cat caregivers and concentrated on becoming better trappers. What were we thinking? 

Jan Weber