The Annual Cat Capturing Festival

Our cats are, as most others are, quite intelligent and constantly alert to the threats of their environment.  My plan to catch them, for their annual trip to the vets needed to be sneaky and well thought through.  Both I and the cats have had some amazingly traumatic moments and so I have always been keen to minimise this as much as possible.  In this case the cats had become accustomed to spending most of their time outside, not being assisted by their banishment from the living room for reasons of hygiene.  Their territory was the garden with drop in visits to the garage just to eat food.

My plan utilised the experiences of the previous occasions and made assumptions, flawed as it turned out.  I negotiated with An to allow the cats to access the living room in the weeks leading up to V-Day.  I often waited up for them and sat in silence until they ventured nervously into the living room.  They were especially cautious as they were now unfamiliar with the room.  The day before I blocked the exit on the cat flap following their food, they were immediately alerted to their escape being blocked and went into hiding in the garage, leaving their food uneaten.  Poppy whimpered for a bit, which tugged on my heart strings as I reassured her it was all okay.  I left them for the night and had a good nights sleep.

The next morning I was down early to feed them and both came out reasonably happily and had a bit to eat.  They quickly returned to hiding.  The appointment was 11.00 and thus I began to make my preparations.

I put the two cat boxes together and placed them out of sight in the living room.  I noted Poppy in the corner under the boiler.  I placed cardboard between the two fridges to cut off the depth of the recess into which the cats could retreat.  This was Poppy's favourite bastion where she always made her last stand.  Having made those preparations I then left to do some errands.  I was confident that their capture would not be too difficult.  I had assumed that Obie was in one of the two cardboard boxes with the cat beds in, my first failed assumption.

At about 10.30 I moved in with the boxes, carefully closing the living room door behind me.  I sought Obie first, thinking he would be the easiest.  I carefully peered into the cardboard boxes expecting to see a pair of nervous eyes looking at me and, if I am honest, I was hoping they would both be in the boxes.  It turns out that two pairs of eyes were watching me from another vantage point.  My stress level picked up as I realised that the task had become harder.

Our garage is full of ideal bolt holes suited to terrified and highly agitated cats.  Obie was found hiding under the gas and electric meters but soon darted off along the pipes behind the storage boxes and towards the boiler.  I had to remove from the side all boxes and other bits and pieces to get rid of hiding places.  Quickly he darted into the second kitchen, a much smaller room.  I closed the door to the garage and hoped that he had not gone behind the washing machine, which would have been game over at that point.