The End of an Era | Over the Rainbow Bridge for Little Callie

If you’ve been around reading this blog for any length of time, you may have read at some point that we had a massive amount of feral cats at our house. When we moved here in late June 2012 we knew there were a couple of feral cats because we would see them when we came for closing walk throughs or for the first initial move-in. But it was when we came in late one night and the headlights turned to the carport that we saw just the number of cats we were dealing with. I spent several months trapping and then getting them fixed and releasing them, which I wrote about here. We dropped down pretty quickly in number after Chris and I went to Washington state in August of that year, with some of the kittens disappearing. But we had a steady herd of them for several years, though of course, one by one, they would get hit by a car, coyotes or dogs would get them, or some got ill and wandered off to die.

Little Callie at 12.5 was the last one from that pack. Her remaining sibling, Ruby, died after being attacked by dogs while we were in Arkansas in March 2021. We returned and found her dead in the garden path not far from the house. Little Callie was always one to stay close to the house or carport, sometimes wandering to the pond for water but mostly over to the potting bench to get a sip of water. We had a bowl for her on the porch but in the last year or so she was reluctant to use it because racoons would use it, and no matter how often I rinsed it out and refreshed it she didn’t want anything to do it with it.

She was a very sweet girl. She loved to come out and say hello and get pets. A very talkative little girl. She had some injuries over the years from fights with other cats and possibly wild animals, too. Life is rough for a feral cat.

This year she started having issues with her nose, first a growth situation on one side and then in the last few months the cartilage was appearing to be slowly rotting away. At first I thought perhaps it was an injury and then infection but it kept getting worse. We took her in this morning knowing she would not return home with us but wanted to ask the vet anyway what could be done. The vet thought it was squamous cell carcinoma and given her age and outside life status, it wasn’t something we were going to treat or was it something she was going to recommend. And so, we said our goodbyes and let her go.

I feel bad about it in some ways because she *was* living and hadn’t gotten to the point with pets where *you know-know* and it is time. But I hated to see her suffer and be in pain and it was only going to get worse.

I will miss seeing her run out to greet us when we pull in the driveway or when we come out of the front of the house. She loved to beg for food even if she had already eaten–typical cat!

I leave you with photos from her younger, healthier days. Goodbye Little Callie! I’m so glad you were in our life all of these years!

And so ends this period of managing feral cats!