Being sneaky requires stealth and planning. You have to decide what equipment you need to execute your project. You have to decide the location. Above and beyond all, you have to act fast.

Last night, I came home and fed the brats,…er…cats. I grabbed some plates, a fork and a knife and some paper towels and brought them into the bedroom and shut the door. I then pulled some chicken I had baked the night before out of the fridge and raced to the bedroom before the kitties could get a whiff of it and slammed the door behind me. The mission was now already halfway accomplished.

The second half of the mission was more strenuous. As a treat, I like to occasionally give my guys some chicken. It breaks up the monotony of Friskies Mixed Grill, Liver and Chicken, etc., etc. But Sammy and Boo have only 2 teeth between them and Twinkle Toes and Snagglepuss have trouble eating sometimes. So, I sat on my bedroom floor behind a locked door for an hour and a half cutting chicken parts into tiny little pieces. My thumbs and forefingers are very sore this morning.

As I sat there, I could hear them scratching at the door and growling at each other as they jockeyed for position. I find it amazing that they can smell this stuff as well as they do. They had by this time abandoned their regular food and were waiting to pounce on me. And sure enough, when I had finished, I stood up with plates of shredded chicken, opened the door and it was like the Great Furry Flood had rushed in. I set the plates down strategically in different places to try to minimize the ensuing feeding frenzy. It was not easy, but I did it.

Because of my mom’s surgery and because kitten season is pretty much over, I have not done much in the way of trapping or surrendering kittens or friendly adults that wander into my colony to the ASPCA. But the very real threat posed by new arrivals into my colony is a great motivation to get back into the swing of things. With trapping, it helps if you have a feeder who actually cooperates with you.

We in the feral cat trapping community don’t loathe those that feed the kitties. We just don’t trust them. They are notorious for thwarting our efforts to trap ferals simply to make their lives better. I have been working with the feeder of this one colony for years now. Whenever he travels, I feed the kitties. Whenever he finds “newbies,” I try to get the friendlies into the ASPCA or trap, neuter and return them if they’re feral. You’d think he’d know enough to listen to me by now!

When you need to trap feral cats, they need to be hungry enough to want to go into the traps which is where you put the smelliest, most godawful crap they love to eat. That means you stop feeding them for a day or two prior to trapping. Unfortunately, some feeders think the wrath of God is going to come down on them and that the cats will die a slow, painful death if they don’t eat for a few hours. This particular feeder is not this bad, but close enough.

Just days before I was due to trap the new guys, he called me and said it’s too cold. Wait until later. Well, “later,” in my humble opinion, may very well be too late. And besides, cold has nothing to do with it. He takes excellent care of these cats and so going without food was going to bother him more than it would bother the cats.

So, I came back from visiting Mom in CT earlier than usual on a Sunday afternoon, spent a couple of hours prepping for the trapping and went out to the site only to find that he fed them!!! He claimed ignorance. He’s ignorant all right. It’s a bloody miracle that I’m not typing this column from a prison cell because I almost killed this man. He brings out the worst in me. Luckily for him, I had time to trap them before the spay/neuter date and managed to get all three cats I was gunning for.

One of the cats was ear-tipped already, which means he had been previously trapped and neutered (vets will slice off the tip of the left ear to let others know the ferals have already been fixed). I decided to hold him for a day or two because he looked sickly and I didn’t want a sick cat to simply suffer and die if I just turned him loose. Both a friend and my mom said, “You’re not keeping him, are you?”

And then, in spite of myself, I ended up at the ASPCA surrendering cats. They were not ones that I had rescued. I was doing a favor for a friend. On a hard-earned, much-looked-forward-to day off. I hate having a conscience.

But, when the ASPCA is accepting adult cats and a rescuer is in desperate need of getting kitties into good homes (read between the lines here: she’s got way too many cats), I figured there would be other days off for me. I hope. My mom, endearing soul that she is, said, “Why don’t you bring some of yours there too?” Mine are either too feral, too old or too sick. And so I replied, “Why don’t I just bring them to your house?” She said “noooooo!” Mom is great, but she had enough of cats, dogs, horses, poop on the floor and lawsuits when we were growing up. Ah, well.

Going to the ASPCA on Public Intake Day is truly an experience. You could spend just minutes there or all day. This particular instance took all day. The poor intake manager had one interruption after another and had given his assistant the day off. The rescuer whose kitties they were kept calling me to see if I was done yet and I had to tell her no. But it turns out that she was having more fun than I was.

When she called me the second time, she was coordinating with firefighters on how to get a cat down from a 3-inch apartment building ledge several stories up. The kitty had pushed through a window screen, apparently to better enjoy the view, and got stuck there. Whoever said cats were geniuses? Anyway, the rescuer had one of those thingies that they use to grab scary dogs around the neck with and got him down. But the fun was not over.

She left the scene after the cat was safely down when she got a call from a partner of hers. It turns out that another cat came out the same window and got stuck on the same ledge! This kitty was not so lucky. He fell or jumped and suffered a broken leg for his trouble. It turns out that the tenant in that apartment had died and left 4 cats behind, which the loving surviving family members were going to “throw out.” Two kitties were still inside. The three uninjured ones were taken to shelters and the fourth one with the broken leg is at the vet’s and will go to a shelter soon.

And so, I’ve had enough excitement for at least a few weeks. Kitten Season is again just around the bend. And yes, that is where you’ll find me: around the bend.

Debbie Graham lives in Flushing, New York, where she is slave to ten cats. When she is not tending to them, or her feral colonies, or her foster cats, she is writing, sailing, drawing, or watching Humphrey Bogart movies. She supports her cats by working as an Administrative Assistant.