When they are ready, they will come to you. Lessons learned.First, never ever force a cat to do anything. She is still scared of her shadow and will run away and hide if approached, but it was a beginning.OK. She (the vet) said she (the cat) hated people, but encouraged us to be patient.We brought her back, named her Tiger and gave her some space.After three months in the household, Tiger finally let us touch her very tentatively. When we picked her up two days later, I asked the vet how she had done. I put antibiotic cream on my cuts and scratches.Our local vet sedated her, spayed her, gave her shots, a flea treatment, and meds for worms. But we eventually succeeded and carried our terrified feral to the vet in a tiny cat carrier. In hindsight, I wish I had known that a net was the way to do it. Catching her was hard to do, as she already saw us as a threat. This was now a month after she initially came inside. Once she went into heat, I had to do something.I finally chased her down to get her the help she needed. I was hoping she would calm down with time. To her, we were predators (like everything she had experienced in her life, aside from her mother). She certainly wanted no part of a cat carrier. I didn’t take her to the vet right away, since she was hiding behind the refrigerator and wanted nothing to do with us.
Nempie Blues' answer to How do you domesticate a feral cat? It really takes time.Back to our particular feral kitten. If you adopt a pet store cat, that cat never chose you.I agree with everything Nempie Blues wrote. Remember, they may be scared, but they still chose you. Adopting a 7 month old feral cat as we did is about the same as adopting a 12 year old street kid, so you can imagine the bad attitudes that have already been learned.With their fear of humans, can an older feral still become a loving addition to the family? Definitely. However it’s rare.)The older a feral cat is, the harder it is for them to adjust. (Some kind, patient and insightful readers have said otherwise, which is encouraging. And they may never lose their fear of humans and captivity. They will almost always have a different instinct about something, either antisocial toward other animals or toward people, or both. There is no such thing as a truly domesticated feral cat adopted much older than 8 weeks. Ferals take more time and patience.Both ferals and abandoned house cats need our help and love, of course.Feral cat vs stray catBringing this terrified feral inside was only the beginning.Have we domesticated our feral cat? Not really. Former house cats that were abandoned will accept being adopted in a heartbeat and love you for doing so. They have totally different instincts and are not domesticated the same way. Many strays, on the other hand, were once house cats but were abandoned at some point. A feral is one born in the wild and has never lived with humans. If we came anywhere near her, we were hissed at.A stray cat is not necessarily feral.I doubt that many stray cats are actually feral. She went nuts trying to escape, but I knew that this was the only way to save her (even if she didn’t see it that way). If I got kicked out, so be it.I tricked her (using food) into coming inside and quickly shut the door behind her. It was either take her in that very day or let her die. Even if there was a way, the neighborhood association wouldn’t have respected it (one of the strays that was made to “disappear” was a TNR cat with an ear notch as proof).I couldn’t stand it. We had no way to trap her and work with some rescue organization. Other than adoption, the only other way to do something for the kitten was to get her into a TNR program (trap, neuter, and release) but there was no time. We weren’t allowed to have another cat per our lease agreement.
#DUDE STOP GAME BY OHMAIGOD PLUS#
Our neighborhood association (in Japan) was ready to exterminate any strays that were in the area, plus there was a phenomenal winter snowstorm that was likely to kill any animals that our association missed.During that snowstorm, one particular stray/feral kitten showed up at our glass door crying for food and shivering. Here’s how it happened.We had a sudden cat crisis. We trapped our most recent feral cat when she was 7 months old.