My husband thinks we are animal whisperers. Considering that we have been forced to trap-and-remove small wild beasts in our own home – the same small wild beasts that we brought into our own home under delusions of domesticity – he is clearly wrong. 

It all started so innocently. Oh, and I started it. We were newly married when I learned about the adorableness pipeline known as kitten fostering. 

PSA: to be part of this miracle, work with a local animal shelter. When animals come in that are too young to be adopted, the shelter farms them out to human foster parents until the babies can have their shots and get their fixin’ surgeries and find forever homes. 

If baby fluff balls aren’t your jam, you can take older animals who need rehabilitation, physical or emotional. We had a few of those guests cycle through our guest bedroom too. But mostly, for several months of the year, we were a kitten daycare. A few times we had mamas with babies. But mostly, it was just us and the fur munchkins. In retrospect, clearly they were our gateway drug. 

So last year, when a cat helped me pick out a car, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. I was on a test drive, tied in hopeless knots over whether to buy this thing. As I pulled into the parking lot of a Wendy’s, a gold and white cat appeared out of the shrubbery, blinked in the direction of me and the car, and sat down majestically before the front bumper. 

A deep sense of peace settled over me – I was to buy this car. The cat had blessed it. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to return this favor by helping the cat. 

A little time talking to Wendy’s employees and hanging around the parking lot later, I met Mr. A. Mr. A has a heart the size of the Wendy’s parking lot and the car dealership combined, 13 cats of his own and 13 colonies of cats that he feeds. And cause he’s a pro at the cat game, Mr. A was also working to get all of ‘his’ cats spayed and neutered. Mr. A and I decided we would work together to get all the cats in the Wendy’s parking lot fixed. 

Now here’s the catch – with rare exception, feral felines don’t allow people to touch them. 

So to get such a cat to a vet clinic? You have to trap them.

Together, Mr. A and I padded down the traps with newspaper, sprinkled smelly mackerel and tuna inside, and hunkered down in our cars to wait for hungry cats to take the bait.

It didn’t take long to get some takers.

Once the cats were in the traps, they went into the back of my car, destined for my laundry room where they would fast out the night. (Surgery next day = fasting, sorry guys.) I tried to make them comfortable by padding the bottoms of cages with soft blankets & whispering that we meant them no harm. 

The next morning, off the cats and I would go to the animal shelter clinic. I’d pick them up later that day, still in their cages but groggy from the anesthesia. Then it was back to the laundry room for a day or two of recovery before I took them back to rejoin the colony. The moment the trap door opened, they would long-jump out of the cage and zoom into the parking lot shrubbery.

So there are a lot of steps in the fix-a-feral dance. Notice that for every single one, THE CAT IS IN THE TRAP. (Except for the actual surgery part, which doesn’t count here, because that involves anesthesia and veterinary staff.) The cat staying in the trap is the fundamental law of feral cat trapping.

My husband started questioning that law once we brought our first pair of ferals back from surgery. “Look. They know we’re helping them,” he said as we cracked open the trap doors just enough to scoot little bowls of food inside. “You can tell they’re really sweet. They’re young, too. I bet we could get them used to people.” The cats, who had been named Busy and Hizzy by our daughter, shone their green eyes up at us through the cage bars, blinking encouragement. 

Suddenly I was the sheriff enforcing a cruel policy of caging while my husband was Florence Nightengale, caught up in growing affection for our little furry patients. My husband poked his finger through the bars, gently touching Busy on her black and white spotted back. She flinched but allowed the contact. Hizzy looked at me plaintively through the bars that created checkered shadows on his gold and white coat, reminding me that without him, I’d still be in Car Buyer’s Purgatory. “Well,” I allowed, “they don’t seem all that feral. Maybe we could socialize them.”

A plan was hatched: I would check with Mr. A. My husband would secure the laundry room-bathroom suite where the cats would stay. If things went well, we reasoned, the cats could stay with us for a few weeks while we recruited adopters. If not, well, we’d just coax them back in the traps and return them to the colony. No harm, no foul. 

We raised the doors on the traps to release the prisoners. The cats sat in the traps, motionless. “You can come out,” my husband urged, waving his hand in front of their open doors. 

Hizzy scooted out of the cage and disappeared behind the dryer, followed seconds later by Busy. We hung our heads over the side of the dryer and cooed words of encouragement. “I’ll start spending more and more time with them every day. They’ll come out when they’re ready,” predicted my cat-whispering spouse as we closed the laundry room door. 

The next day, Hizzy was still holed up beside the dryer but Busy had wedged herself behind the toilet. The following day, Busy was back to dryer base camp but Hizzy was nowhere to be found. 

We searched the laundry room and bathroom to no avail. I felt a rising sense of panic in my chest – how could an animal go missing from my laundry room? How could I tell Mr. A that one of his cats vaporized on my watch? That’s when my husband interrupted my doomsday inner monologue by pointing to the open duct work in the laundry room ceiling. “I wonder if he’s up there.”

We clambered up on the dryer and shone a flashlight into the ceiling crawl space. A pair of green eyes shone back at us. I stared in disbelief. Hizzy was easily a car length back, inside a crawl space that was maybe a foot tall and two feet wide. Aka, he was totally, completely out of our reach. 

“Well, I didn’t see that coming,” acknowledged my husband as we shut the laundry room door. “I bet he’ll come out tomorrow.”

He didn’t. What’s more, Busy was gone, too. I grabbed my phone and climbed on top of the dryer, not at all surprised when I saw not one but two pairs of green eyes staring back at me from deep inside the crawl space. “We’ll keep leaving out food,” my husband promised weakly, when I called him into the laundry room to see the latest development. “They may decide to come out in a few days.”

This may have been where my personality split. The kind, quirky, eccentric animal lover willing to share her hearth and home with animals in need was shoved into the backseat by my ID taking command.

As far as I was concerned, Mission: Socialize Wild Cats was a fail. I wanted my laundry room back, and I wanted the effing cats out of the effing ceiling. 

So I concocted a plan to starve them out.

Not STARVE them starve them – the last thing I needed was dead cats in the ceiling. And I still cared about them, I reminded myself through clenched teeth. No. I wasn’t going to starve them in the conventional sense. I was, however, going to stop leaving food in their bowls, wait for a day, and then plant some good smelly tuna in their traps. Eventually, I prayed, they wouldn’t be able to resist, they’d step into the traps, and boom – trapped cats, back to the colony cats, out of my effing laundry room ceiling cats. I’d treat the whole colony to tuna as a reward. 

Busy and Hizzy were stubborn. Or terrified, bless their hearts, or they’d just come to really love the laundry room crawl space. They hung out hungry in that ceiling for a day or two. But finally – finally! – on the evening of day 2, I walked into the laundry room and there was Busy in the trap, licking her chops. I took her back to the colony that very evening. The next day, Hizzy followed suit. I triumphantly gave him the rest of the tuna in the can and back to the colony we went. 

Back at Wendy’s, I opened up the trap door for the last time, next to the car that had started it all. Hizzy remained unmoving in the cage. “You’re free, buddy,” I whispered. He took off like a shot, arcing into the shrubbery like a gold and white streak. 

I looked down at the empty cage. It was quiet, and sad, that the cat who I’d worked so hard to get rid of was suddenly gone. It wasn’t him, though. It was our lifestyles. He was born feral, and I was a first-world woman with a laundry room. We just weren’t meant to be together. And because of us, he and the rest of the cat colonists would live out their lives and that would be it. No more feral kittens in that little patch of the world. 

Oh, except for the one mama cat we missed, who gave birth to the kittens we fostered the next spring. But that’s another story.