This Morning at the Shelter, or, Attempted Jailbreak (long, but I'm still laughing)
This morning I went in to do my usual Friday shift among the strays as usual. Things are getting a little busier this time of year, with (usually) moms with kittens, or litters of kittens, or (sometimes) single kittens being brought in, not to mention the usual run of strays and surrenders that we get, although this morning we didn't have any moms with kittens. Did the usual walk-through with Natalie, who runs the stray jail, while she pointed out the potential troublemakers, flight risks, sickies, anyone needing samples to be run to the clinic, etc., plus some colorful backstories on a couple of the inmates. Everything went along in its usual fashion until I went down to the laundry/stockroom for more towels, cleaning rags, and gloves. I had to walk through food storage, which was stacked with bags of dog food where the delivery guy had dumped it on his usual Thursday delivery, leaving only a narrow path, and walking back through there, I nearly lost my full basket of stuff but didn't.
I got to the door of the stray jail and Natalie hollered, "Don't come in with that, there's a cat out. That orange guy." I knew which one she meant. It was the one on the back top row that she'd been suspicious of when we did our walk-through. She said at the time, "Cheyenne said he was nice in Intake, but it took both of us to wrestle him into a box so I could bring him down here." He'd gotten out when she opened his kennel door to clean and headed for a kennel full of kittens to pick a fight. I put the basket down blocking the door and edged my way in (fortunately I'm really small) to help in the capture.
Every time we thought we had him cornered, he went under something or around a corner. We blocked as much "under" as we could and kept trying to head him off, but he is a really smart guy and kept evading us. I tried treats but those didn't work. Then Natalie said, "Get the catnip!" The catnip is in a shaker jar like a spice jar. First I shook some into the carrier we were trying to chase him into, but he wasn't having that. Finally Natalie said "F--- this, I'm getting the feral net." We only use the net as a last resort, but we'd been chasing him for 10+ minutes by then. More catnip. We finally managed to corner him in a place where he just couldn't get away and there was already quite a lot of catnip on the floor. At that point he looked up at me and for some reason, I can't tell you why, I was inspired to just shake catnip down on him. He looked suddenly blissed out and at that moment Natalie snuck up behind him and netted him. Boy, was he PO'd! She carried him in the net back to his kennel and had me put more catnip on his mat before getting him out of the net (which was a job in itself) and slamming the door. We sat down on the floor and laughed ourselves silly.
While we were still laughing, the volunteer coordinator came in to ask us something, saw us laughing and wanted to know why, so we told her. Her only comment was "Why didn't somebody have a video camera?"
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