3 Sept 2012

The Little Ninja Saga - Episode IV: A New Hope?

(Originally published Dec 3, 2011)
 
As I soon discovered, getting your hands on a live trap free of charge is a little more difficult that you would imagine. The trick was that we would need it for about a week and this was also going to be a single-use endeavour. I mean, I’m hoping to not have to trap another live animal in the near future... or ever. For best results, we needed a thoroughly clean or uncontaminated trap. When an animal gets caught, there’s usually a bit of pee or more importantly some type of pheromone related to fear or stress. It’ll mark the cage as being unsafe. If little miss scaredy cat could ‘smell’ that something had been trapped before, she would never go into it and of course we would never catch her.

 
I called around to some of the local animal shelters (specifically BCSPCA and the Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association) assuming that they would have a plethora of traps…. and would be gracious enough to lend them out. Nope. They had a limited supply and needed to use them for their own means. That’s fair enough. I also called around to some pest control agencies (knowing that the size of trap I was looking for is intended for raccoons). I thought maybe they would let us borrow one (or rent for cheap)… just to use their equipment instead of using their services. Annnd nope. Some would rent them out on a weekly basis for $200, which was a bit steep for us at the time. Home Depot had them for purchase (at $100) but they too did not “rent” them out like they do with some of their other equipment.
 
Luckily, Cheryl made contact with a gentleman from a local small pest control company, Green Valley Pest Control, I think. The guy she spoke with had an extra raccoon trap that we could just simply borrow... for the week… no charge… in fact he’d deliver it. Too good to be true? Nope, just an awesome helpful guy. The next Wednesday after work, voi! a live trap was waiting by our door.



As I mentioned previously, consistency was the key to trapping anything, especially this little kitty. Once it knew when and where the food was going to be, it would start to wait for it. At this point, the kitty would come in the morning to feed usually within 2 minutes after placing the dish outdoors and calling her (well, just calling “pretty girl” since we didn’t know her name). Now that we had the trap, we had to starting by leaving it outdoors, with the trap unset, door locked open (very important here), and the food inside. I would need her to start going into the cage to eat. She knew what the food was, but now we had to present it within something new… but still make her safe. I understood, we would need at least three days for her to feel comfortable to eat from this cage… we were going to try it in two (yeah, rebels, I know, huh?). Once we gave her this false sense of security after a few days, we would obviously crush her spirits with this giant metal trap…like a teenager after a breakup, she may never trust again. It was the only way.

So right outside our door, the cage was left in the morning with food inside Thursday and Friday. After calling her name and placed the dish, she came quite quickly the first day. I stood in my usual position, behind my kitchen table eating cereal and drinking coffee in the dark… with barely a view of the cage where I was hoping the kitty would not see me. It took her about 10 minutes of walking around the cage and smelling it, ten minutes of waiting, ten minutes of determining if this cage was safe. Fortunately, hunger won and she eventually went in. Friday morning, she did it in 2 minutes.


Note: We brought the trap back inside just before I went to work, just in case the trap was stolen during the day.


In the meantime, we had converted our second bedroom into a kitty oasis where we can place the Little Ninja in order to help acclimate to a life indoors. What used to be (and had been for the last 3 years) a storage room wanting to be an office, that room was totally cleaned out. Stuff went to second hand stores, other stuff was “dealt with”, even more was shoved and configured to fit into our closets. Finally after 3 years, clean floor space was exposed, closet doors could close, and our desk and bookshelves were accessible again. But then we filled it up with kitty litter, kitty food bowls, a climbing tower, and seating for us when we wanted to try to bond with the Little Ninja. Cheryl even devised a little hidey-hole under the desk, where Ninja could escape and feel comfortably hidden… just in case she needed more time to adjust on her own.




Saturday was the big Kitty Trap Day we had planned. We figured it would be an easy start to the weekend just to continue the consistent pattern… I would get up at 5:30am, as usual, get the trap set and get the food ready. Cheryl would wake up and get ready (difficult to do on a Saturday morning). We would be fully dressed, jackets on, shoes on, wallet and keys in hand. By 6:10, kitty would try to eat. By 6:10:01, kitty would be caught. By 6:30am we would be at Atlas Animal Hospital, the only 24hour vet clinic we knew about. Within hours, we would be home and warm again with a kitty in our laps. Seemed simple enough… but “best laid plans” and all that, I guess.


Yes, the food was in the cage. Yes, the cage was set. Yes, the house was dark and I sat watching the cage with eerie suspense. But no, the Little Ninja did not take the bait. Maybe she sensed my anxiety, my tension… like how dogs seem to feel that ‘energy’ kinda. After 10 minutes, I did spot a black shadow walk by the cage… but she did not go in. After 30 minutes, I was a bit hopeful, so I was going to the back room to check online for the Atlas clinic’s phone number. While I was in the back, Cheryl called to me. The kitty had gone to the cage entrance, she had stepped inside, may have touched the food (hard to tell in the dark), but did not set off the trap… and she ran away very quickly. Maybe she knew it was a trap, maybe not… either way, this was going through my head for the next 3 hours:

 
 
For the next hour, I stood by the kitchen table watching the cage outside. Cheryl laid down on the couch a few feet away, wearing her jacket and shoes. Our lights were still off, it was dark outside, and I couldn’t tell the difference anymore between shadows, leaves flying about, or an actual pure black kitty. My eyes were playing tricks on me.

After an hour, Cheryl went back to bed to wait (she never did fall back to sleep, though). Out of sheer persistence and bull-headedness, I couldn’t move. I stood guard for 3 hours, barely moving, watching the cage, drinking coffee after coffee, seeing no further signs … but eventually seeing the sun rise. At one point, I went for a walk around the block to find the kitty. I spotted her down the block, sitting under a tree next to the school. Odd place since I have never seen her beyond our yard and the yard of our neighbours.

By 10 o’clock, Cheryl came back out of the bedroom. As if on cue, Ani, the cat from upstairs, came scratching at out back door… like she has every weekend for years. I jumped outside and grabbed the trap… hoping Ani wouldn’t set it off accidentally. She was never really food-oriented anyhow, so there shouldn’t have been such a fear. Ani came in and we played a bit before she went back out to explore. With Ani loose and defending her territory, with no new sign of the Ninja, and with the cage back indoors… the Trap Day was aborted. Discouraged and a bit defeated, we were uncertain if this would even work.

~~ ~~

The next chance would be to catch her at her evening feeding time. We witnessed her eating a couple times after I came home from work, so we figured we’d try again at 5:00pm… just hoping it’d work. We went about our usual Saturday, with shopping and groceries and a little drive around town to collect everything else we needed for our second room/kitty oasis. By 2pm, we were home again. I took a peak ‘round the corner and saw the Little Ninja on the fence between the 2 houses. This was her usual perch where she could be “safe”, but was commonly harassed by Ani and Saffi from the deck upstairs (and just a few feet away). Those upstairs cats were pretty good about defining their territory, and this poor little black kitty rightfully didn’t belong.

Knowing the cat was out, I thought that this’d be good chance to try to feed her (and trap her). So out came the cage and the food. I called her name…. and would see if nature would take its course. But within a minute, freakin’ Wex shows up instead! Out of nowhere! This hungry, food driven, white cat would definitely set off the trap and ruin to whole deal. I quickly jumped out again and chased Wex away (see previous post about the Wex story)

After a couple more minutes, I tried the trap again. Called the kitty. And now Ani walks by again! So again, I brought the cage back in and tried to chase Ani away.

Another 15 minutes later, I walk around to house and I don’t see the kitty… and better yet, no sign of any cat. Hopefully Wex had gone home, hopefully Ani was having adventures further down the road… hopefully the Little Ninja was hungry. So out comes the cage… again. I could see the black kitty sitting on the fence now… but what I didn’t see was Ani on the deck above giving her the ol’ staredown. Obviously the Little Ninja wasn’t going anywhere. I brought the cage closer…,and freakin’ Wex shows up again! Seriously, it was like the Benny Hill theme should have been played. With these 2 other guys hanging around, with me jumping in and out of the house, with the cage rattling it’s way in & out of our yard, the Little Ninja wasn’t going to try anything at all.

I gave up.

I would have to wait until the next morning and try this all again.


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