on the cat distribution system
Sep. 2nd, 2025 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rimrunnerMy cats have always been strays. The first one turned up under my then-roommate’s mother’s porch in Roswell, New Mexico, and of course for the rest of his life (about 19 years, give or take), we joked about that cat eventually rejoining his mothership someday.
The next one had taken up residence in a friend’s backyard in White Center, the neighborhood just south of where I lived in Seattle. After some attempt to figure out if he had a home, said friend put the word out that maybe said cat needed adoption. He was an unfixed ginger tabby (the cat, not the friend) who was about two years old per the vet but underweight enough that we’d thought he was younger. And he had ear mites and fleas.
The one after that turned up in a feral cat colony at a friend’s workplace. He was a three-month-old kitten who hadn’t been born there—the company provided food and TNR, so a new kitten would have been noticed. My friend thought he’d gotten lost or been dumped, and had gravitated to the colony due to his age and that domestic cats, even feral ones, will live more socially than their wild counterparts generally do.
And then, about a month ago, a kitten took refuge in our woodpile.
“What do we do?” my husband texted, along with a photo of said kitten rolling around on his shoe like she’d just found her long-lost mom.
“Take her in, of course!” This is how nearly everyone I’ve told this story to has responded, and it is what we ended up doing. The woodpile in question is in a pretty remote location, a far enough distance from the nearest houses that while adult cats that clearly belong somewhere do roam the area, it’s a long way for a kitten barely out of the weaning stage to venture. It’s also, always, possible that she was dumped. Her friendliness toward people and ready understanding of the litter box suggests that she wasn’t born feral. But we don’t really know.
That’s always the difficulty with stray cats—we don’t have any way of knowing their stories, though we can make educated guesses based on behavior, health, and where they’re found. None of the cats we’ve taken in had collars or chips to aid in finding whatever homes they might have had, but that doesn’t always mean much. A cat not normally let outside might well not have those things, and plenty of people never get around to it even for pets that are allowed to roam.
Cats have a way of finding their own homes. Two households that I’m friends with have joked that they bought six-figure cats and got a house thrown in for free. In some parts of the U.S. it’s still the norm for people to let their cats outside to wander at will, and some of these cats will hang around multiple households; when I was a kid, there was an orange Manx who was friendly with many houses in the neighborhood. The danger of jokes like the Cat Distribution System is that you can’t readily assume that a cat who shows up at your door, or in your yard, or in your woodpile, doesn’t have a home.
On the other hand, sometimes they really don’t. Cats wander off, or get lost, or get scared, or get dumped. Plenty never have homes among humans in the first place. It’s why all my cats have been strays; I can’t give every cat a home that doesn’t have one, but I can give homes to the ones who’ve come to me, and that lack them. In every case, I try to ascertain—through lost pet posters, social media posts, asking around, checking for ID chips—that that’s really the case.
The next one had taken up residence in a friend’s backyard in White Center, the neighborhood just south of where I lived in Seattle. After some attempt to figure out if he had a home, said friend put the word out that maybe said cat needed adoption. He was an unfixed ginger tabby (the cat, not the friend) who was about two years old per the vet but underweight enough that we’d thought he was younger. And he had ear mites and fleas.
The one after that turned up in a feral cat colony at a friend’s workplace. He was a three-month-old kitten who hadn’t been born there—the company provided food and TNR, so a new kitten would have been noticed. My friend thought he’d gotten lost or been dumped, and had gravitated to the colony due to his age and that domestic cats, even feral ones, will live more socially than their wild counterparts generally do.
And then, about a month ago, a kitten took refuge in our woodpile.
“What do we do?” my husband texted, along with a photo of said kitten rolling around on his shoe like she’d just found her long-lost mom.
“Take her in, of course!” This is how nearly everyone I’ve told this story to has responded, and it is what we ended up doing. The woodpile in question is in a pretty remote location, a far enough distance from the nearest houses that while adult cats that clearly belong somewhere do roam the area, it’s a long way for a kitten barely out of the weaning stage to venture. It’s also, always, possible that she was dumped. Her friendliness toward people and ready understanding of the litter box suggests that she wasn’t born feral. But we don’t really know.
That’s always the difficulty with stray cats—we don’t have any way of knowing their stories, though we can make educated guesses based on behavior, health, and where they’re found. None of the cats we’ve taken in had collars or chips to aid in finding whatever homes they might have had, but that doesn’t always mean much. A cat not normally let outside might well not have those things, and plenty of people never get around to it even for pets that are allowed to roam.
Cats have a way of finding their own homes. Two households that I’m friends with have joked that they bought six-figure cats and got a house thrown in for free. In some parts of the U.S. it’s still the norm for people to let their cats outside to wander at will, and some of these cats will hang around multiple households; when I was a kid, there was an orange Manx who was friendly with many houses in the neighborhood. The danger of jokes like the Cat Distribution System is that you can’t readily assume that a cat who shows up at your door, or in your yard, or in your woodpile, doesn’t have a home.
On the other hand, sometimes they really don’t. Cats wander off, or get lost, or get scared, or get dumped. Plenty never have homes among humans in the first place. It’s why all my cats have been strays; I can’t give every cat a home that doesn’t have one, but I can give homes to the ones who’ve come to me, and that lack them. In every case, I try to ascertain—through lost pet posters, social media posts, asking around, checking for ID chips—that that’s really the case.
