u/barefootwasp

Bean is home!

He is lethargic and I can tell he’s scared so I’m just sitting in the room with him and trying to let him have his space but knowing I’m here. He has not left the windowsill and that’s ok. He is shaking a little bit. Our dog is not happy but we’re keeping them separated. If it just doesn’t work out with our dog, we are going to foster Bean until we can find his forever home.

Whatever the outcome is, he will not have to go back to the streets.

This is my first time doing any of this, and any advice and help is very much welcomed, as I am a nervous wreck!

This morning, I trapped the brother of my sweet Zinnia, who is still missing. He is at the vet for his neuter and medical care. We are going to try and transition him into our home (he is NEVER being released back to become coyote bait) and if it doesn’t work out, we will responsibly rehome him. We will work with a rescue to do so.

He is not happy with me this morning but I know in the long run, he will be.

My question is, how does the dog introduction go? We have a very lively but friendly German shepherd/husky mix. We have no idea whether he has a prey drive. He shows curiosity to the neighborhood cats and occasionally barks at them (he barks at everything) but we don’t know how he would do with an indoor cat. We also don’t know how Bean will react to him.

We are going to keep them separate of course for a time, but I don’t have any idea on how to make this an easier transition. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Picture of our dog in the comments because I love showing him off!

I posted about my sweet Zinny girl last week and have Another update: Zinny has still not shown back up, but I did unfortunately notice while reviewing camera footage from my office last night, I saw two large coyotes inside the fence around our perimeter. Somehow they breeched the fence. It has led me to believe that that is probably what happened and it absolutely kills me, but I have seen no signs of that anywhere on the property. Her brother came to visit this morning (before I saw this footage or I would have used the carrier to get him right then), and I plan to trap him in the morning and take him for his TNR and then take him home. If he comes back this afternoon, I will do it this afternoon but he’s not often around before I leave the office for the day.

This isn’t the update I wanted to share but it is an update. I’m so beside myself and feeling guilty that I didn’t get her sooner. We are all so shocked that a coyote was even over here. It was a big reason we didn’t bring her and her brother home to be outside cats, as we have coyotes in our neighborhood and thought they were safer here as it is fenced and there are tons of trees to hide in, and big trucks to hide under, as well as just other hiding spots. It is why I worked so hard to socialize them, so that I could bring her home, and maybe bring her brother home, or fin him a home. I feel like I was too late and that is so hard to live with. My office is in an industrial area and nobody had ever seen any signs of them so I just thought they were safe and I am so broken.

I have been taking care of this sweet semi socialized feral girl at my office for the past 7 months. She started coming around for food when I started feeding a couple of others and she was the most skittish of them all. If I opened the office door, she took off. In January, out of the blue one day, she let me pet her and the rest is history. She and I bonded extremely closely but she was still have trouble being social with anyone but me. She would greet me at the gate every day and every time I’d open the door to my office, she’d come running. I named her Zinnia Honeybell. She had already been TNRd when she started coming around. I hounded my husband to let me bring her home and finally we had decided to try bringing her home. We had things to work out before we could just take her in (working it out with landlord, my husband has a cat allergy and we have a let’s just say lively 2 year old shepherd husky mix, who we weren’t sure of with cats). Our plan was to bring her home and if for some reason it didn’t work out, dog couldn’t handle it or she couldn’t handle the dog, or if my husbands allergies were too bad, we would find her a home so she could be a safe indoor kitty the rest of her life.

We purchased everything she needed and were going to put her on our pet insurance and bring her home this weekend. I was going to take a few days off work to get her acclimated. I have the carrier in the back of my car. I got to work yesterday and not a single sign of her anywhere. Nor was there today. This is a cat who never missed a meal and who was my shadow at work.

I am beside myself. I have been bludgeoning myself since yesterday over what could have happened to her. We were getting ready to bring her to her forever home, off the streets. I am so sick to my stomach. I am so lonely at work without her. I miss her slow blinks. I miss that meow and how she’d run to me to flop on her back and let me scratch her belly. I could just die thinking something bad happened to her right before the start of her “good life”, that I was too late in getting everything in line. I don’t know what to do with myself.