Now that we had gotten Phoebe (Nuke, Battlecat) safely off to her new home, it was time to catch the most wily of cats: Missy.

Missy was our main cat at work.  She was small, black, fuzzy and loved to be fed.  While the other cats came and went, Missy was always around and while I started feeding her, she really got attached to Edwina.  

Originally, Missy was fed down under one of the several bridges that are around our building.  It was secluded and very few people really knew that Missy was there.  She was fed twice a day five days a week and life was good, so good in fact that it attracted the attention of a raccoon.

Now a word about the raccoon.   This little guy (girl? who know, I didn't check) was fearless.  He would come up and help himself to any food that Missy had not eaten.  I don't know if this is normal behavior for a raccoon but he would take some food, wash it off in the water we had out for Missy to drink, then eat.  It was fun to watch and he didn't care.   You could almost walk up and pet the little guy (although that would be a very, very stupid thing to do, you may pull back a nub).  

Since Edwina didn't want Missy to get attacked by or to attack the raccoon so we moved the food and water bowls right outside the front doors of our building.  This arrangement seemed to make her very happy.  Every morning Missy would be waiting at the front door for Edwina.  When I would walk up her tail would come up and she would start meowing until someone came out and fed her.  She was almost petable.

This arrangement seemed to work out fine.  Missy would eat in the morning then lounge around various places throughout the day.  A sign, one of the planters, under a window when it was raining, once you had been around for a while, you know Missy's various haunts.  Everyone seemed to dig Missy, everyone but the snitch that turned her in to Physical Plant. 

Now it was time to catch Missy.  She was a lot more suspicious of our motives than Phoebe was.  I had thought of feeding her and while she was eating, grab her and stick her in a carrier.  She had always been very comfortable around me and would even let me pet her a bit but when I decided to catch her, she knew that I was up to something.   She wouldn't get close to me anymore.  Grab and stuff just wasn't going to work.

We still had the trap that we had used to catch Phoebe so we set it to catch Missy.  Real easy, right?  Yea, I thought so too.  Then we waited.  One day, two days, nothing.  Missy would look at the trap, then nap right next to it.  She wasn't afraid of the trap but she knew what it was and seemed to be saying "You expect me to go into that?  HA!  I say, can you smell that?  That's contempt you're smelling.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm 20 seconds late for my mid-day snooze."  She was a cat like that.

At this point I was determined to catch Missy.  She was thumbing her nose at me (in typical cat fashion) and I couldn't let that slide.  I decided that fed kittys do not go into traps.  I tried to keep my coworkers from feeding Missy at the end of the day.  A day or two, I figured, would be all that it would take to get Missy hungry enough to venture into the trap but I was being thwarted.  My one coworker who has a very soft heart felt so bad letting Missy go hungry that she would slip her some food in the evening. 

I finally had to lay down the law.  I said that if they were going to keep feeding Missy then I was washing my hands of the whole deal.   They said that "after this weekend" they would do it my way.  That Monday Missy was hungry.  We set the trap and even as hungry as she was, Missy was having nothing to do with the trap.  Tuesday morning my coworker set the trap and I went out to check it a little bit later.  

Missy was checking it out, but not going it.  I then had a thought, if it didn't work we were going to have to go to Plan C which would be attempting to catch her with a net.  Down I went.  I pulled the food out of the trap and put a few pieces in front of the trap.   Then I put a few more pieces in a line leading back to the bowl of food in the trap.  Then I waited.

Then I waited.  I didn't have long to wait.  Missy was hungry and attacked the food in front of the trap.  Then she ate her way into the cage.  She managed to work her way all the way into the back of the trap and actually eating the food that was in the trap!  "Oh come on!" was my thought.  Then she shifted and WHAMMO! we had trapped ourselves another cat.

It was such a relief seeing her in that trap.  It had been a couple weeks since we had started trying to catch these two girls and we finally had the last one!  The student that was taking her was called and came in less than a half hour later.  I made an appointment to have him take Missy to my vet.  I was so worried that she would be positive for leukemia as well.

Later that day we heard the good news!  She was clean!  No Leukemia!  The student took her home and as of a few days ago, Missy had taken to life as an inside cat very well.  She loves to be brushed and sleeps on the student's bed.  There was a little problem with her not using the litter box, but that's been taken care of and Missy's using the litter box as intended and not sleeping in it.  

Another successful cat rescue!  Oh yea, we haven't seen the raccoon since the cat food was taken away.