You see I have lot of cats. Yes, three of them are mine- I absolutely claim them. Then there’s the dozen or so that have decided to move into my backyard, too. They are feral – totally not interested in my love and they only love me for my ability to feed them. They are pushy little jerks, too, when the feeder is empty for even a split second. I should probably mention that I have named most of them…

When I moved into this house, there was only Lily (gray, over bearing, short-hair). One day, Lily brought two kittens with her. I started feeding Lily and her kittens, and then that meant that Charlie (fat, orange male missing most of his tail, always grumpy) and a slew of their friends suddenly appeared as well. Wondering what I had gotten myself into, I turned to the google machine and learned about feral colonies. What is a feral cat colony you ask? You can read all about it here. Not particularly interested in leaving my amazing blog? Here is the long and short: you feed them, capture them (humanly), you snip them, you release them back into your backyard, and you continue to feed them (and call them by names that they don’t seem that impressed with).

The idea is great, you build yourself and non-reproducing little tribe that sits on the porch and demands food every time you walk into the backyard and utterly cements what your friends already knew – that you are the old, crazy cat lady and you are not even 40 years old yet. Sigh.

So … back to the snipping part. I have the capturing part down, but getting them to the SPCA is difficult with a very, very small vehicle. I put out a call on facebook for help with transporting these furry fiends to non-babymakingville and Ally (and her SUV) answered the call.

Ally was a terrific sport, the first batch of four cats (which included Lily) that we sent in decided to smell up her car, but she was happy to help and I was happy to take pictures of her beautiful (and incredibly smart!!) girls.

A first for me? Meeting a stranger online and convincing her I wasn’t crazy and she should come into my backyard to pick up 4 caged cats and transport them to the SPCA at 8 in the morning. (Don’t worry, we had a facebook friend in common and I used that to convince her I wasn’t THAT crazy).