helping the strays and abandoned

Friday night we set a trap for a gimpy raccoon that has been coming to our cat feeder.  He has a bum back leg.  We talked to a raccoon rescue lady in Simi Valley and she told us that if we could trap him and bring him to her, she would have his leg fixed.

She told us to use a hard boiled egg, cut in half for bait.  The first night we should put the trap out, but keep it from closing.  On the second night we should set it to trap him.

I checked the trap around midnight and the egg was still there.

a family visits

on Tuesday, February 9th, we met the owner of the empty house.  He had just gotten out of his car and was standing at the foot of his drive way.  My wife, Kat, said “lets meet him”, so we ran over and introduced ourselves.   We spent the next 3 hours standing in his cold house and talking.

He told us his deceased wife had 35-40 cats.  The neighbors complained about the cat poop in their yards.  He spent $100K cleaning the smell out of his house.

He said it was okay to feed the cats on his property.

He was only in town for 8 days, going back to New Jersey.  He had lots of stories to tell us.

My wife discovered that we can slide a food and water tray under the gate to the backyard of the empty house.  We saw a third cat there, that we had seen before at our feeder.  The owner is still not home.

My wife discovered a house where at least two of the strays in our neighborhood hang out.  The house looks abandoned, because the owner isn’t home most of the time.  The yard is over grown. There is a ledge along the house that provides a safe perch for the cats.  It keeps them off the ground, away from coyotes.

My wife saw two cats there, which occasionally stop by the feeding station we have set up at our house.  One is a tortoise shell and the other is a beautiful, long hair orange male.

We left some food for them and were surprised to discover, that after a few hours, the food was barely touched.  Is someone else in the neighborhood feeding them?