I thought I would share my own experiences with Feral cats, though they have only been in my life since hubby and I bought a new house!

First a little about me and hubby. I grew up with cats, and until I was 23 I was always around them. Then I went to college and when I came home from college found I was allergic to cats! I never knew while I was always with them, but the separation was enough to mean i couldn't tolerate long term association with them. Hubby has always been allergic to them. When we got married in 2001, it seemed fairly obvious that cats would never be a part of our lives.

After we got married I sort of got "into" reptiles and then into mice to raise to feed the reptiles and of course because I like the little furry critters too. We bought a new house in August of this year, complete with a "mouse house" for my furry and scaly friends. Shortly afteer we moved in we noticed that cats were hanging out in the side yard near the "mouse house". It didn't take long before we could see them in our back yard. Hubby started to croon to them and next thing I knew he was bringing home a big bag of catfood.

Now we have our group of cats, all of them with names. When we first moved in there was "Momma Kitty" who was seen nursing the 12 to 16 week old "babies". She seemed huge. Black, with a white face and tummy and legs. Two of her "kids" seemed most friendly, a long haired gray tabby with the same white face and belly, not to mention about 7 extra toes between her two front feet! And the other was a short haired gray tabby with no white. We called them Sparkle and Twinkle. Then one of their siblings decided he wanted to get in on the action. He was a short haired gray tabby with a perfect white face and paws, so we called him "Pretty Face". The fourth sibling makes short appearances but doesn't seem to like people too much. Hubby calls her CoCalico. All of these, Momma Kitty and her four babies, are willing to be fed, but not willing to be petted. Another visitor is Pantera, a male pure black tom cat who had obviously been strung up by the tail as he had a newly half amputated tail. He loves attention but rarely comes around. To round it all off, we have "Twinkle Twin" who looks like one of the "kids" but is obviously an old roughed up tom cat, a dullish gray tabby.

We've progressed to the point where the cats come into our kitchen to eat, even come into our living room to admire our snakes or our gerbils, and come into my mouse house when I am cleaning mouse cages and rat cages (and OH, they LIve for that occasional escaped mouse!)

We believe that Sparkle and Momma Kitty are both pregnant now. We are hoping to find out if there are any programs to help us to pay for getting them all fixed. We know we can catch them easily enough, and there are vets in our small time, but hubby and I are both high school teachers and do not have money to pay for multiple cat fixing. So we are going to do research to discover if there are any programs so that we can get the cats all fixed so that we don't have to have a plethora of cats calling our home theirs and breeding themselves into oblivion.

Anyway, thought I would share the story of the kitties who have decided we are there to serve them.

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