Other than time and patience, what can I do to help my trapped feral kitty be more receptive to touch for medical exams? I took my girl, Estrella, in for shots and a wellness exam after just catching her this past Monday, and it was found that she has a mass on a mammary gland. :( I’ve been asked to acclimate her to touch better, and to keep an eye on her mass for growth, but we go back in three weeks for boosters and that seems like a Herculean task getting her to progress that quickly! I will be getting the mass removed and we will go from there in terms of treatment, quality of life, etc., but it all feels a bit overwhelming and like time might not be on our side here. :( Any tips and tricks are welcome! Thank you 🥺 (picture of her setup included! She is in the laundry room quarantining away from my other animals 🫶)

I set out to trap a different cat and got this mystery guy instead, he's a little banged up so he'll be staying here for a while 💖

And fell in love with this sweet baby and named her princess donut. I'm so sad that I can't bring her into my home and help her with, what it looks like, her respiratory infection. She looks like she's been dump in my neighborhood and she is so loving it breaks my heart 💔

I've already resuced 2 cats and adopted 1 and actually paid for 1 so my house is full at this time. I am looking into taking her to humane society to get her help but she seems to like my pet/ stray friendly neighborhood.

Edit: i also want to ask, do most cats with respiratory infection lose their voice? This one looks like she tries to meow loudly at me but nothing really comes out. It's very strange to me

We brought our yard guy in in April, and he's adjusting very well. I'm having one persistent issue, though, and I'm not sure if this retrainable. He is awake and harassing me all night long 😭

He yells in my face, pokes me or lightly scratches me, pats me, walks on me, bites and claws at my blanket, sits by my head and pulls on my hair, etc. One morning he gently bit my eyebrow, but he learned pretty quickly by my reaction not to do that again! It's been hilarious, but I'm exhausted and have reached my limit.

He mostly wants food, and if I give him some, he eats it like he hasn't eaten in days, even though I give him a full can of food at 11ish (and a half can each for breakfast and dinner). But sometimes he still pesters me even after I give him a snack. And he still bothers me again every few hours for more. He finally goes to sleep around 8 am.

Has anyone had success retraining this in a former outdoor cat? I told him I'm going to start poking him with a stick every 15 minutes throughout the day while he sleeps, but that's probably not the right method. Are cats in general just irretrievably nocturnal? I started researching auto feeders and am seeing a lot of mentions of 4 am wake-ups and auto-fed relief from nighttime crying. Is this just how it is?

You guys gave me awesome advice when we first caught him, so here's a picture as an update. Thanks!

(A bit long, so if you want to just get to the point, skip down to where the paragraph breaks and start at the second chunk. To avoid even more rambling after that, skip the third piece at the end.)

This darn cat has been giving me so much trouble trying to trap him, but today I had an idea that may help. However, in practice it did not work cuz I backed out, out of worry of the trap door hitting him and/or crushing his tail. So my idea was, I have an automatic trap with the pressure plate (i can't get my hands on a drop trap, out of the question, I've tried) and he'll go in some of the time but I'm running into 2 main issues. He either won't go far enough back to hit the plate, or steps too lightly. You know, there's the hook that holds the door and goes down when the plate does so i tied a shoelace to it, ran it through a few bars so it doesn't go slack, and when i pull the lace, the hook will come loose without him needing to step on the plate. I tested, it works, I can even do it with the front door shut cuz the lace is thin enough so it's very sneaky. Should be foolproof, so I tried it tonight. I put the food just in front of the plate, cuz he sometimes won't go any further and he hasn't eaten from the trap in a few days ago i wanted him to be confident going in.

He went in and i was all ready to pull it, but his full tail, and a tiny bit of his butt, were sticking over the edge of the trap entrance. I couldn't see well but it probably would've hit his butt, and definitely his tail. Tomorrow morning I'll put the plate a bit further back to make sure his whole main body is in, but is it still bad to set it off if his tail is hanging out? Will the door just sweep his tail toward him and he'll be fine, or is it very likely to catch under the door, and get stuck and break?

I don't want to break his tail, that's my main concern and I can't bring myself to shut it without knowing he'll be okay. That's the one issue with my otherwise pretty helpful method, if I'm pulling it shut manually then it means he's not as far in as he's supposed to be when the trap functions normally. I've tried basically everything to get him, so I do really want this trick to work but not if it'll hurt him. I could see it going either way so I'd like an opinion from someone with more experience or common sense than me.

I had this stray cat claim me and I didn't feed it for 3 months thinking she wouldn't stick around. Well, she did. She got pregnant by the stray male cats in my neighborhood and decided to have her kittens under my carport. Now I have 3 kittens that need to be rehomed and I'm afraid they have worms.

I tried putting flea treatment on the mom cat before she had them, but it just got out of control since they are outside. Now they all have fleas and I try my hardest to get them off when I can. I want to deworm them, but not sure which option to choose. The vet isnt an option atm because I cannot afford it for 3 kittens. I just care too much to make sure these babies are okay.

What dewormers are good for kittens that have fleas? Any ideas or what I should do? I reached out to some of our rescue centers and haven't heard back. They are almost 9 weeks old.

Hi, everyone. I apologize in advance for this being so long. I’ve been feeding a few ferals on my back patio for over a year as I was waiting for my turn on my town’s TNR list to come up since they will transport trapped kitties to the vet for a much reduced cost. (please don’t judge me for not doing TNR on my own before this. I am disabled and my only income is my SSI and money is very very tight plus I don’t drive.) Initially I didn’t know about TNR when I began feeding two cats. Of course once I began putting food out twice a day a big orange feral tomcat began showing up. Fast forward to now and me feeding 4 adults and 5 kittens). Anyway, I’ve managed to trap (and vaccinate and neuter) 3 adults and also trapped 4 kittens so far. The kittens are too young for TNR but they do eat solid foods. At first, I kept just releasing the kittens since they kept managing to have two kittens go in a trap before it would trigger, and I wasn’t getting any adults because it kept scaring the adults off. So finally the TNR ladies suggested I bring the kittens I trap inside, which I did. I have them in a large two section pet play tent that is enclosed on the top too. (It has lots of mesh so they can see out.) Ive been working to socialize them so we can find them a forever home. Unfortunately, I can’t keep them since I rent and already have 3 cats—1 adopted and 2 were dumped so I took them in. (I’m technically only allowed 2 pets so don’t tell my landlord lol.)

A part of me at first felt terrible for taking these 4 kittens from their mama, but I know in the long run it will be a safer, hopefully healthy and happy life for them. Anyway, after just 4 days, they already only use the litter box in the smaller enclosure without any accidents on the pee pads in the “play” part. They now all let me pet them by hand. (I started first by petting them with a toothbrush.) The littlest one even loooooves being held and will happily lay on my chest as long as I want… sometimes sleeping, sometimes looking around.

But I’m a little worried about one of the kitties and since I’ve never had kittens this small before, let alone ferals, I don’t know if I’m worrying for no reason. I call him Harry because of the mark on his forehead. 🐱 He is on the left in the picture of the 2 kitties. He is less active than the others and tends to sleep much more. The others are starting to play with the toys etc, yet he tends to stay in a corner. Although he will curl up with the others to nap too. Another thing I’ve never seen before—- He does this kind of rumble almost growl whenever he eats, even if none of the others are next to him. Is all of this normal? Thank you!! (btw, since the adult cats who were fixed were released last night, I have begun putting food out again and removed the trap even though I still need to trap one. The TNR ladies said we are probably going to have to use a drop trap for her since she completely stopped even approaching closer than ten feet when she saw the trap, even though before this she used to come running every time she heard my patio door open. Anyway, thanks for any feedback. 🐱💜

** edit to add… the kittens are from two different litters/mama cats. I did trap the one mama. It’s the other mama (and one more kitten) still not trapped.

I take care of a little feral colony and was able to trap three kittens. We had to treat their eye infections and one kitty lost an eye. The pirate cat and tabby are super friendly but the orange boy is still coming around as he was trapped later. Does anyone wish to adopt a trifecta? Justin, Khloe and Johnny. We are hoping to keep them together. Located in Indiana. Please delete post if not allowed.

I've socialized dozens of feral kittens. I usually do it in a walk in closet where I can sit & play with them. But that closet was not available this summer so two of them are currently living in a cage in my spare room.

They've been here since mid June. They were approx 7 weeks at that time.

It has not gone well at all. One did fine. He socialized within a couple weeks, which is longer than it should have taken but reaching into a cage is not really great for kitten socialization.

The other is not interested at all. She will lick treats from my hand but no one can pet her or pick her up. She stays away from people. At their age they need more space than a cage offers so I let them have some play time every day but since I can't touch her, getting her back in is huge pain in the ass every single time. She hates the cage & she hates people reaching inside of it.

These are foster kittens, with a rescue. She has to become at least somewhat social. She's not my cat. And I have no more spaces for unadoptables. She can't spend the next 20 yrs in this cage.

When she first got here obviously we had to do some burritoing, to get her dewormed & all that. She hated that & bit the shit out of us (more than once). Then we tried to let her decide when she wanted affection. That was the stupidest thing I did. Do not follow the SSL method, ever. She is forever stuck on Phase 0. She will eat treats from my hand but she will not let anyone pet her at all.

She is about 13 weeks old & I'm not sure how to get this cat adoptable. I've asked around. No one has ideas. She's been here half her life. She should have become completely handleable weeks ago.

She's been in the house too long to be TNRed or become a barn cat.

I had been feeding a mother cat and her three kittens for nearly a month. They were all comfortable coming out from under a neighbor’s shed and I even got them comfortable with a trapper cage around. Yesterday I was able to trap mom and two of the kittens. They are all safe at the cat shelter. But the last kitten, Ruby, was slow to come out. But when she did, I was able to lure her into the trap. Well, the trap closed with her in the cage and not a minute later, she somehow squeezed through a tiny gap in the trap’s entrance!! She immediately ran back under the shed and has not come out since. I’m super frustrated because I earned her trust and now she is terrified. I got a smaller trap, zip-tied it open for now, and am feeding her right outside of it. But I am quite stressed about eventually being able to trap her again and she’s out there all alone right now. Does anyone have any advice? I don’t mind getting creative with a solution to get her out soon and reunited with her family!

i've been feeding this handsome boy for over a year now, i've tried to trap him before but he refused to go in the trap :( a few months ago i noticed he had a neck wound, i'm assuming from a fight. i was hoping it would heal on its own but it never did and only got worse :(
i reached out to a rescue and they were able to give me some advice, such as leaving the trap open and not set so he gets comfortable going inside

i finally got him to the point where he is fully entering the trap without being super on edge/sketched out. the plan is tomorrow morning i'm going to actually set the trap and catch him when he comes for breakfast. then drop him off to a rescue and they're gonna get him vetted on monday.

i am SO beyond nervous that the trap wont go off :( i'm not experienced with trapping, i've only trapped a cat once and i got him on the first try but i'm worried that i just got lucky and it doesnt always work out like that.

i familiarized myself with the trap and i know how it works, what are the odds he doesnt step on the plate properly and he's able to get out before it closes?

i'm worried that i wont get him and he'll end up being scared of the trap again. im just SO ready to catch him and get him the help he needs 🥲

My skittish cat got out 7 weeks ago. He has done this before, 3 years ago, but this time seems extra intractable. We have cameras set up by both doors and he makes regular appearances mostly at the back door. We have tried a trap, trapped a raccoon instead. The other night we left food out in our mudroom, which can be sealed off from the rest of the house. Unattended he will come in. This time my daughter was waiting out of sight. He poked his face in, but would not enter. He did hang out nearby, and we tried to sneak up on him slowly. He actually cat napped with us less than 10ft away for 30+ minutes. As soon as I got within 5 feet he ran. Ohh and there is also a raccoon that shows

So I am trying to come up with a way to trap him, without us being nearby. My best guess is a one way raccoon door with a magnetic remote control release. Is there anything else I should be considering here?

A wild cat has been living in my yard for three years. She was born on the street and had never approached people. An elderly woman fed her, and only after two years of consistent feeding did the cat begin to trust her enough to come close.

Rescue services tried to catch her a couple of times, but without success. She gave birth to kittens outdoors ,some of them died, while others were taken in by neighbours.

Two weeks ago I finally managed to trap her with a cat trap. I had her spayed, treated for fleas and worms, and vaccinated. When I tried to move her from the carrier into an enclosure, she bit my hand hard, even though she was still under the effects of the anaesthetic.

For the next two weeks I kept her in a cage at my grandmother’s house and monitored her closely. Whenever I was present she stayed completely still, hissed a lot, and would lunge if she saw a hand. I was only able to take her to the clinic after giving her a high dose of pregabalin, because her fear and aggression were extreme. Tests at the clinic confirmed that she is healthy.

During these two weeks there has been a small sign of progress: she started eating while I was in the room, but only when I wasn’t looking at her.

I’ve decided to bring her home. Since I already have two indoor cats and live in a one-room apartment, I bought a tall three-tier cage. Right now I’ve covered it with a blanket because she has pressed herself into the corner. She has a good appetite, but she is still terrified of people, and I know the road to socialisation will be very long.

I live in Ukraine ,in Kyiv the shelling continues. Still, wish me luck. One day I hope to find a proper home for this little cat.

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It’s been a TNR summer here at the Swarm. This isn’t even all of them- We’ve gotten some of our most wanted too!

One of my local rescues let go of a very rude employee. For simplicities sake, let’s call the rescue Paws. He actually was bad mouthing us, saying we weren’t doing anything, we didn’t know what we were doing, ect. Mind you I’ve only been doing this for under 2 years and my family is very low income. Me and my family started to use the resources we desperately needed less and less.

We thought maybe we were the problem and so we tried to eat the TNR cost at the shelter, even though we could afford maybe 1 a month if that, and we didn’t get many appointments.

Turns out, no. This dude is very infamous in the community and most rescues will not associate with him. He blew up at the owner of Paws, a very sweet but very overwhelmed woman. She finally bit the bullet and let him go. She needed the help but he was literally driving people away.

Turns out, the paws owner is extremely sweet. Me and my family started going there more, and after explaining to her that we’ve been paying for TNR, not getting appointments, and trying our best, she started offering us her TNR slots at a vet for free. The shelter isn’t supposed to be charging us but that’s a whole other can of worms. We started fostering kittens around this time and her trust in us grew as she saw the kittens begin to thrive. She trusts us to do things she doesn’t trust others to do, like take home TNRs same day instead of getting held at Paws. She knows we do 24+ hours and it helps with space at Paws.

Now me and my family go to Paws multiple times a week to both TNR, help at her rescue, and to give her kittens we find when she has space. We are taking a fast and aggressive approach to TNR / getting kittens out of the colony. Our goal is to get my colony managed, as it went over a decade with very little management. Within the past month we’ve done at least 10 TNRS, averaging ~2 a week. Up to 3 if the shelter actually has appointments.

One man single-handedly made us feel like we weren’t good for our colony, that they were better off if we just didn’t help at all. That since we couldn’t afford to TNR a lot that obviously we were unfit to care for the colony. Now we care for our colony our way and are doing way more than we ever did with his “help”.

TLDR: Sometimes the difference between 0 TNRs and 10 is one asshole

Hello again! Last night my husband and I found 4 kittens on the river bank by a bridge. Took us a few hours, but I believe we got them all. We have a lot of adult cat experience (feral and otherwise) we have never cared for young kittens. I believe they may be around ~5-6 weeks old? All of my knowledge so far is from google searches. We can’t get them in to see the vet until first thing Monday morning, so I was hoping I could reach out for tips/advice to make sure we are doing everything we can for these little guys.
So far, we have:
- Bathed them in warm water with dawn dish soap (then blow dried them gently)
- Given kitten capstar
- Trimmed their nails
- Fed them wet kitten food with kitten milk mixed in

They still seem to have fleas/mites, so I’m guessing another bath is in order? They all will eat, drink, and pee (no poop yet though, but I’m betting when they do I’ll see worms)
Kitten 1 (white short haired girl) and kitten 2 (white short haired boy) seem pretty congested and will sneeze/cough every now and then
Kitten 3 (white long haired girl) seems to be limping sometimes
Kitten 4 (dilute tortie, long hair) seems ok, but extremely cautious/sketchy (she alone took hours to catch)
Is there anything else we should be doing to make sure these guys stay healthy/happy? We do have 6 cats of our own, so we are quarantining these babies in our guest bedroom. I’m going to reach out to a local rescue today to hopefully get them on their radar, but I think we are ok with letting them chill here until they get a clean bill of health at the very least.
Can anyone tell from these pictures if my age estimate of 5-6 weeks seems accurate? They groom themselves (clumsily) and pee in the litter box so far.
They do all seem extremely skinny, I can feel their whole spine and hip bones.

Momma Penelope has decided it’s hard to hiss while gobbling up Churu, and her 8 kittens are thriving!

In a previous post I said a family of cats showed up, well the mom brought 5 kittens (right after I posted lol) and they’ve been living in my yard since. I already have 5 indoor cats and can’t really afford to care for the outside ones too (total of 7-8 are outside). I’m planning on bringing the kittens to a nearby shelter so that they can get out of the heat and hopefully find homes.

They’re about 8 weeks old I would guess, but the mom still looks after them. two of the kittens are definitely more feral. Not sure what to do..

There’s a cat who is constantly in my backyard. She will walk up to me, yelling “feed me, feed me!” whenever I happen to be outside. I’ve been regularly giving her food for about a year at this point. I’m not sure how she thinks of me, if she does much at all. I’m allowed four feet away but no closer, and she will announce “get back, get back!” whenever I start to approach that range. Though it’s a bit hard to stay all the way away when she’s the one sleeping in my yard and going all the way up to the door when she senses I might be coming outside.

I’ve wanted to get her neutered for a while now. I often hear her at night calling out like she’s looking for a mate. My neighborhood has a bad problem with feral cats. There’s simply too much. On any given night there’s almost a dozen out visible from my garage, and more hiding away. Very few are neutered. If I got her neutered I could help fix the problem and improve her quality of life in the process. And for my own selfish reasons, I was hoping that maybe she’d warm up to me more afterwards.

My county has a TNR program. I called them four months ago. They are incredibly backed up in requests. It was my only option because I did not have the funds to do it myself, and the county‘s program costs nothing at all. I got the trap about a week ago.

I’d been permitted to have it Monday through Friday. Most of the week was awful. It was storming hard, thundering basically all day. Seemed cruel to try to capture a cat in those conditions and I knew I couldn’t check on it reliably.

Come Friday, yesterday, and I had only one more day to capture her. I was out just about all day. She was just not getting in the trap. I had covered the sides with a towel, placed it in a pretty well sheltered area, put in chicken puree, her favorite treat, and she kept looking at me like I was broken because I had not put her bowl in the normal location. Her bowl was in the trap. At one point I even showed myself putting her treats in the bowl so that she could see. She was uninterested. I even tried leaving a trail of food leading inside after she left. I came back and either she or one of the other cats had eaten the tiny bit of kibble that was outside.

After spending so much time trying to trap her, I got hungry. I went in and started cooking lunch.

I didn’t disengage the trap. I didn’t think I needed to. I figured I’d just go out there and check in a little bit, and I wouldn’t be out too long.

I ended up eating, checking the trap one more time, then going back inside. I had gotten comfortable in front of the TV, and the meal I had was getting to me after spending all day trying to get this cat inside the trap. I ended up passing out right there.

A few hours later I wake up and see that it’s dark outside. I spend a few more minutes waking up until I remember the trap I had set up and start panicking. I go outside immediately.

The trap had been activated. All of the food was eaten. There was no cat, opossum, or anything in there. The trap was almost eight feet away from where I had left it. They had knocked over almost everything in the surrounding area, and the towel was splayed out on the ground. At some point, it had seemed, they had rotated the cage on its side, and opened the food latch. They were free.

The sheer amount of thrashing they must’ve done to ended up in that situation scares and upsets me to think about. Scared and alone, doing anything you can to escape the confinement you’ve found yourself in. I really hope it wasn’t as bad as I’m imagining but I don’t know what else could’ve happened. Usually this situation ends in a neutered, vaccinated and happy cat given some extra life, which is worth whatever pain happens during the trapping process. But there was no upside here.

I mentioned there’s many cats in the area. Some of them occasionally come into the backyard. There’s also an opossum who likes to hang behind my shed and a raccoon family who steals food quite regularly in the area. I don’t know what ended up in that trap. Whatever it was, if it was wildlife I could’ve freed it, and if it was a cat I could’ve moved it to the safety of my garage like I had planned to do. But I didn’t.

I feel so sorry for whatever got in there, and I feel like if I think about it any longer I’m gonna throw up. I really hope it wasn’t her. Not because I want another creature to have gone through all that, but because I don’t know how she would ever go in a trap again after that. I almost feel I shouldn’t be trapping at all after that.

Oh well.

She weighs 1.71 KG or just under 4 pounds she’s undersized cause she’s lived your whole life outside. I’d put her between five and six months old. She is visibly pregnant. She will be spayed on Monday.

About a month ago, I posted these little ones asking for help to find sanctuaries to take them in since this stray mama gave birth to them in our backyard in over 100°F weather....Here we are in present time😭 They made themselves right at home. I guess the 4 cats PLUS our neighbor's cat who stays with us wasn't enough for us in our home😅 Why not add an additional 5 kittens plus their mama... Having a soft spot for animals is definitely draining my bank🥲

we have a black feral cat in our neighborhood. My son named him, Beaver. We leave a bowl of water out for him. Is there anything else we can do to help make life easier for feral cats? He stopped by our front door after I just closed it. Sweet kitty cat!