Ceiling Cat Is Judging You

[stevenpiziks]

New Kitty, now tentatively known as Ceiling Cat, has gotten up into the basement drop ceiling and refuses to come down.  She sneaks down at night to eat and use the litter box, but that's it.  We can't get to her--she retreats to the plastered ceiling over Aran's room or over the bathroom, where there are no drop tiles to pop. 

This is getting serious.  Ceiling Cat clearly intends to stay up there forever.  Up there, she has no way to acclimate to us or the rest of the house, and since she has food and litter, she has no reason to overcome her shyness.  I think she would live up there for the rest of her life if we let her.

I thought about this long and hard.  Then it occurred to me that I've run into this problem before, more or less.  Back when I was renting a townhouse, we got a raccoon in the attic crawlspace.  The landlord called a critter removal company, who came out and set humane traps for the animal.  Within a few hours, the raccoon was trapped in the cage and whisked away.  Why not do the same thing for a cat?

And I also thought, why hire a company?  The humane traps can't be that hard to use.  Why not buy one and trap the cat myself?

A bit of web searching turned up the fact that my local hardware store does indeed sell humane cage traps for less than $50.  The raccoon size would do nicely.  I popped out and bought one, assembled it with minimal fuss, and put it in the basement with Ceiling Cat's food dish in the bait section:



Now we wait . . .

Comments

[jhetley]

Trap will probably only work once . . .

[catlinyemaker]

Little too late, but animal shelters often have humane traps which you can borrow, sometimes for a nominal fee. They work great; the only time we had problems was with a cat who was too light to trigger the pressure plate. Fortunately she was hungry enough to keep returning to the trap and we finally resorted to watching the trap with a long string attached to the trigger.