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A young cat showed up in my yard last year. At first, I thought it was a cat in heat because it screeched/meowed loudly. Eventually, I was finally able to get close enough and saw that the cat looked well fed, healthy, had a shiny coat, and was an intact male. He acted timid and feral, but he didn't look it. He looked like he might have had a home. I asked my neighbors if he belonged to them and none of them said he did. We live out in the boonies, so it seemed unlikely he found his way here on his own and there are no feral cat colonies that I know of. All the cats I see belong to neighbors and are spayed and neutered. Kittens/young cats don't just randomly appear in this area. I do live not too far from an animal shelter, so my theory is that he was dumped by somebody. I also asked around and posted his photo in local facebook groups to see if anybody was missing him. Nobody was, so after determining he had no family I decided to take responsibility for him. He lets me pet him now. Next step is to get him neutered, he trusts me enough for me to pick him up and put him in a carrier. He still does that loud screechy/meow thing. I named him Squeaks.
Sometimes intact stray males can screech & yowl every bit as loud as females, so that's not surprising. Also could have been doing it because was hungry.
This is what he looked like on the day I finally got close enough to get a good look at him, that's the photo I shared around, trying to find out if he was somebody's missing pet. He certainly didn't look like a stray to me. I had a few people reply, but sadly he wasn't their missing cat. The shelter I live near is no-kill and there is always a waiting list, so it seems likely he was dumped by somebody when the shelter couldn't take him. I don't mind having another cat to feed, I have 12 in the house and 3 outside, including Squeaks. He's grown into quite a big cat and now that he trusts me, it should be easy enough to take him to the vet to get him snipped.
^^^This cat looks like a smaller version of the one that we call Big Louie. He showed up at our house about a year ago and he was just about dead. He was torn on both sides of his body, eyes seeping, limping, and wheezing. I was especially worried because we had such a rough winter. We built him a shelter that I am certain that he did not use.
I was able to make sure that he had plenty of food and water, along with mega doses of antibiotic. He now is very handsome and healthy, but I do not think that I will ever be able to get him to the vet.
However, we are now not only feeding Big Lou, but also Little Lou (female), Spotty Dotty (spayed female that I was able to get to the vet and get shots), another young black cat, and a young brown cat. We haven't seen the one that we named Gracie in several months, so she must have a home somewhere.
It is getting expensive, but Big Lou considers our home his home, and the young brown cat appears to be almost starving.
I do not know why people don't keep their cats inside, especially knowing how injured Big Lou was when he showed up a year ago.
He's a beautiful house Panther, and looks in good shape for an outdoor kitty. You're probably right... most likely dumped. Just glad he found someone to look after him.
I read a story about people whose cat disappeared in October then reappeared the next spring. Then in the fall, he was gone again. Came back the next spring.
She followed him the next day to a house a few blocks away where an older woman opened the door and gave him food. She went up and spoke to the woman. Turned out she'd thought he was a stray and fed him, but she and her husband spent winter in Florida and took him along because they were afraid he would starve and freeze.
He is a handsome fellow. He looks like our Annie, who also showed up one day and more or less moved in, literally and figuratively. I adored Annie. She was a little weird at first and seemed to think we might harm her, but she eventually figured things out. She remains one of the few cats -- only one, now that I think of it -- who would allow me to hold her in my arms and dance with her as long as I wanted to. She loved Neil Young and would let me dance with her for the entire Harvest Moon CD. She has been gone a long time and I still miss her a lot.
Because I'm still in love with you,
I wanna see you dance again.
Because I'm still in love with you,
On this harvest moon.
(Sorry for the t/j. I got nostalgic there, thinking about Annie and Neil Young.)
Both of ours are strays. One came to the door around Christmas and was pretty comfortable around people. We put emails around and found that she had been living with some students near us, who left her with a couple for Christmas, who let her escape (she was in heat). They were tired of bothering with her and let us have her. We've had her fourteen years now and she is still going strong.
Leo was living in a water runoff tube. It took us 8 days to catch him after we found him, and neighbors said that he had been there a lot longer than that. People had been putting food out for him. He was still quite young, but he wanted nothing to do with people at all, except to approach food bowls after the donors had gotten quite a distance away. When we first caught him he growled while he was eating his food to keep us at a distance. He's come around to my wife and I, but is still skittish around other people. I also used to see a lot of feral cats, of all ages, when I worked around woods and streams in Delaware. They were definitely not the type of animal that would walk up to a door.
I read a story about people whose cat disappeared in October then reappeared the next spring. Then in the fall, he was gone again. Came back the next spring.
She followed him the next day to a house a few blocks away where an older woman opened the door and gave him food. She went up and spoke to the woman. Turned out she'd thought he was a stray and fed him, but she and her husband spent winter in Florida and took him along because they were afraid he would starve and freeze.
I remember reading a similar story in one of the 'Chicken Soup for the Cat Lovers Soul' books. The cat was a resident of a mom & pop grocery store (in NYC I think), and would disappear in fall & return in the spring. Might have been a variation of the same story.
I imagine it's not the only time we humans have been two-timed by our cats.
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She has been gone a long time and I still miss her a lot. 
