I feel I should start this blog out as I have started out my Catholic confessions throughout my life time, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.” This blog will describe my last week’s action that I was forced into by the circumstances that were taking place in our garage over the summer.

You may remember in one of my earlier blogs I described that last summer a wild cat had moved her litter of kittens under the shed in our backyard. The kittens were quite large so she struggled getting each one under the shed safely.

I was excited thinking as the kittens continued to mature soon they would be out on our lawn wrestling and romping as little kittens do. But we never saw a sign of them.

Finally as late fall arrived and the first snowfall made its appearance a cute black and white almost grown kitten appeared and decided to spend the winter in our garage. Of course it didn’t help matters any that I provided daily servings of cat food and a dish of water for both the kitten and its mother.

Try as I might I was not able to approach either the mother cat or the nearly grown kitten even though I was providing them food and drink. It reinforced the comment that an old, retired farmer had told me about wild cats, “You’ll never tame a cat raised in the wild.”

Earlier this summer the black and white cat wandered off never to be seen again. However the mother cat showing signs of becoming a mother again wisely decided to stay where the food and water was flowing.

So she had her second litter of kittens under the shed behind our house. And again the growing kittens never made their appearance to romp and play in our yard. You can’t tame them when you can’t even catch a glimpse of them! 🙁

I first became aware of their presence when I opened the side door to our garage and there was an explosion as a half grown cat irrupted out of our garbage can where it had been feeding on scraps from the house.

After causing me near heart failure several times I became aware that there were two kittens, one gray and one black.

They remained very elusive and very wild.

I would be reminded of that in the evening as I rested in my recliner watching a Hallmark movie when there would be a bang and clatter coming from the garage.

“Dang, cats!” I would mutter knowing they had just knocked something off the shelves in the garage. You see they bedded down somewhere up in the cluttered shelves and occasionally some of the clutter got knocked to the floor.

An emergency arose as the kittens spent more time in the garage. Their bathroom habits drove me crazy as I was constantly scraping up piles of ‘do-do’. Finally I invested in a kitty litter box and a bag of kitty litter and to my amazement without any training the kittens began using the litter box.

As fall arrived I began thinking what the garage would be like in the spring after having three very wild cats constantly climbing shelves to escape we humans. Chaos! 🙁

Somehow I had to eliminate the cats. Give them away? I can’t give away something I can’t catch. Capture them with a  live trap and move them to a new area far from our house. Bingo! I happened to have a live trap sitting among the clutter on my garage shelves.

I got the trap down from the shelf, baited it with cat food and placed it on the garage floor.

The next morning the trap contained a furious black cat.

We jumped in the car with the trapped kitten and began driving south. We were on minimum maintenance  gravel roads sloppy from the melted snow as we looked for a suitable drop off sight.

Finally a vacant farm sight with a large windbreak appeared. There would be ample winter cover for the cat. So we pulled to the side of the road and freed the animal.

As we began the drive back to our house ‘release remorse’ began to set in. Why did I do such a thing?

Now the cat will wander into a farm and become a pest to those occupants. Not to mention the wildlife the cat would kill to keep itself alive. And what if it couldn’t find enough food to sustain itself and would eventually starve to death?

The feelings of guilt continued to rise. 🙁

Returning home I reset the live trap again with the hopes of capturing the gray kitten. I would worry about what to do with it if the capture was successful.

Two days later the live trap contained a spitfire ball of fur. The wild, gray kitten was captured.

But now do you see the quandary I am in? I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

If I free the cat it will still be free to roam the fields killing wildlife and wandering into people’s farm sites and disrupting things there.

However I could end things for the cat with my 22 rifle or drop the live trap and the cat into the Mustinka River for ten minutes. I wonder if I could rig up a hose attach it to our car’s exhaust pipe and run the hose into a duct taped cardboard box with the trapped cat inside?

There is no easy answer for this situation. This is a dilemma that I did not ask to solve but solve it I must.

‘Bless me Father for I have sinned’ is how I started this blog and that’s how I’m going to end it. There are no more kittens in our garage and I suspect the momma cat will continue to return on and off. With luck a coyote will capture her for a winter snack otherwise next spring I will be faced with  dilemma #2.

I hope my next blog can be a little more uplifting.

Meanwhile in an attempt to raise my spirits I think I might just go turn on the t.v. and catch up on the election news. 🙂

Until next time.