In 2018 I tried to catch my tenants wayward kitty on Buttonwood Street. His little tuxedo cat exited the apartment, and I was going to catch her. I knocked on the door and proudly held up the trap containing his cat. “Got your cat” I said. He replied, “No, she came back”. Perplexed, I looked to where he was pointing. There stood the missing kitty. What?
And so, out of a clear blue sky, I was in possession of a feral cat. I had her spayed and then faced a choice: Do I dump her back on the street or place her in a cat pen where I shelter 3 others?
I remembered the caution I was given a couple years earlier when I caught a starving mother with 2 kittens:
If you don’t pen them, they will wind up dead. Whether by vehicular execution or by the slow march of disease, fights, starvation and exposure, these feral cats generally only live about 3 brutal years.
And so I rolled the dice. Lets see if this cat live with the other three. Thankfully, they reached accommodation to share the pen.
We named her “Milla” after the detective in the British crime show called “Broadchurch”. Like many a true feral, Milla never spoke a single meow to me. But before dinner she would warily allow me to approach. When I reached out my hand, she leaned into it to receive scratches on her head and back. When I scratched the base of her back, she would push up onto her toes like a feline ballerina. Clearly she enjoyed the petting but at some point an alarm in her head demanded that she flee from my affection.
Flight seemed to be her motto. When any of the other 3 would approach her bowl to “share” her food, she didn’t hiss or swat. She just retreated no matter how little she had eaten. And she ate EXCEPTIONALLY slow. I wondered how such a cat could ever survive on the street. And so it became my custom to stand guard at meal time lest she starve to death.
As the years passed, I developed a theory that she had gingivitis and resorption lesions. And back in 2020 I did get her some dental care. But on the odd occasion when a vet examined her, I was told there was no real need for further dental care. Since getting any feral cat into a carrier is a bit like having a bar fight, I would put off veterinary care as much as possible to avoid trauma.
But as this past summer wore on, Milla was obviously losing weight. She was beginning to leave food in her bowl no matter how long I stood guard. I started to change up the food to find something she liked better, but one day as I was standing guard and I noticed that she violently reared her head up out of the bowl and had food literally fly out of her mouth. It was as if she had been electrocuted. Trauma or not, she was going to have to see a vet. I suspected dental issues again.
At first, blood work pointed to a Thyroid problem and resultant secondary issues. So now I took her into a spare bedroom where she could take as much time as she needed and get the full dose of thyroid med in her food. But she still didn’t want to eat because of pain. Then her right eye started to weep. So back to the vet she went. They did a dental procedure, gave her a steroid treatment, a heavy hitting pain med, an X-ray and a biopsy. Within a day her eye got WAY better. Her appetite returned and she seemed to be pain free. She became more active. I dared to hope that maybe it was just an infected tooth. Maybe.
But within a week the eye issue returned with a vengeance. And shortly thereafter I received a phone call: Biopsy says squamous cell carcinoma. X-ray suggests a mass behind her eye.
Even if I had not experienced a fruitless cancer treatment for a cat with the same diagnosis about 10 years ago, just the horrific look of her eye after a few days convinced me. It was time to stop her suffering.
And that’s when it hit me. I would never again see her wary invitation to scratch her back or witness her “On Pointe” ballerina dance. She was a sweet, gentle girl. She came into my life like a bolt from the blue and now she was going to exit the same way. I miss her terribly.
Its true that feral cats can be a nuisance. But humans brought them here and we abandoned them to the streets. Can we find it in our conscience to give them better accommodation than a euthanasia needle at the county shelter? I know we can, so please consider adopting from the County Shelter or from the Friends of the Burlington County Animal Shelter. Please consider running or helping to run a feral cat colony.
Talk to the people at FOBCAS. https://friendsofbcas.org/
Tell them Milla sent you.