First a little background: I have a local feral who comes around almost every morning and I give him some food when he shows up. He is always polite, eats just a little, hangs out for awhile, and then... off he goes. He won't let me touch him at all, but he is content to sit about 10 feet away, giving me the slow eye blinks. He looks very healthy and well fed. I call him Shadow, he is a black cat with green eyes. Here is the thing - he is a trap-neuter-release cat, with his left ear tipped. When the weather is bad I don't see him at all (in fact I hardly saw him at all last winter, then spring came and he showed up again). I've always wondered what his story was. Today, I think I found out.
I was at the dentist. My dentist's office is about 1/2 mile from where I live. As I was checking out, I was looking at their picture gallery (they are huge cat lovers and almost everyone who works there has cats). There was a picture of 3 little black cats, with green eyes. Looked awfully familiar. I asked who they were. "Oh, that was the last of the feral litters that we had here - there were 2 litters, one was the black kittens". Turns out that they know a woman nearby who has a bunch of money and has decided to use it to help feral cats. They had all the kittens fixed (and ears tipped, of course) and now the cats live in a colony in back of the office (there are woods back there). They have a house for them and feed them and make sure they have their shots. As for my kitty, they are pretty sure it is the one they call "Peanut". He tends to disappear for awhile and then rejoins his colony family when he feels like it. Is it normal for a cat to have territory that covers 1/2 mile?
Then they asked me if I had seen any of the cats from the other litter - all tiger cats. I started laughing - sure enough, Shadow brought a couple of them by last year, but they never came back. Apparently they don't like to wander the way he does. So, the next time he stops by, I will have to call him "Peanut" and see what he does. I'm glad to know that he is looked after and has a nice place to live when the weather gets bad. I guess he just likes to pretend that he is the big bad feral cat, living in the wild. Ha!
