Kitten scratches

There's a male cat in our neighborhood who comes around nearly every day and tries to steal some of the food we put out for our outdoor cats. In fact, there actually are SEVERAL cats that try to do this, but one, a medium-haired black male, whom we have nicknamed Blackie, is the most frequent visitor, and he often does manage to get some food when we're not watching closely. Of course, this only serves to reinforce his behavior.

Stealing food is bad enough, but lately we've caught him trying to molest the kittens, too, and this is just beyond the pale for us. So, we went down to our favorite builder's supply store in Khatzor and bought a cat trap.

Here, I'll insert a little story that the lady there who sold us the trap told us. She said she's caught a dozen cats using a similar trap. One of them was actually very clever. He would open an unlocked window, come into her house, steal a schnitzel she had laid out, go back out through the window, and then, most remarkably of all, CLOSE the window behind himself! They couldn't figure out what was happening to the schnitzels until someone actually saw him doing this! By the way, she spoke almost no English, but I was able to understand her story in Hebrew.

So back to the trap we bought. Of course, one of the problems is trying to catch the bad black cat but NOT catch any of our own outdoor cats. Our first plan was to try to put the 3 kittens into the cat carrier so they wouldn't be able to go into the trap. Of course, they were NOT enthusiastic about this idea! :-)

Let's just say that this plan didn't work. Here's a picture, taken today (2 days later) of what one 3-month-old kitten can to when he or she REALLY wants to get away. This is my right arm:

Despite the pain, I was NOT angry at any of the kittens, but we did give up trying to put them into the cat carrier.

And what happened later, you may ask? Well, one kitten DID get trapped and was quite frantic about it. Later, Mr B, one of our adult outdoor cats also got stuck in there. So far, Blackie, the one we're TRYING to catch, has NOT gone in. He will eventually, though, I'm sure, and then we'll "golan" him. We invented this new verb, "to golan", which means "to take a cat to the Golan and release him there". Blackie should be the 2nd intended object of this unpleasant verb. Some of you may recall the first object, Spot.

I can't resist adding one more comment here. As many of you know, we had snakes for about 10 years and bred them during most of that time. Some years, we produced more than 100 babies in a single year. But the sum of all the snake bites I received during that entire time (not really that many, actually) was less than the damage done by one kitten in only a few seconds. And yet, people somehow think that snakes are dangerous!