Operation Kitten Capture, day 3 report: operation on hiatus
No kitten today, but again, the bait was eaten. The trap was again not sprung. This is in my opinion due to the last five (this is the sixth) week of working around 70 hours making my brain soft.
I had been leaving one side of the trap open and one closed, and putting the bait inside by the closed door, so whatever it was would have to actually enter the trap to get the bait. After the lock bar failure of yesterday, rather than swapping the door I used, I simply left both doors open. And left the bait right in the same place, on the far side of the trap, by the now-open second door. So the target didn't have to enter the trap to get the bait.
This, combined with my realization that while working around 12 hours a day, almost every day, I simply do not have the time to spend teaching a feral kitten that humans are okay. This involves a lot of time spent just sitting in the same room as the kitten and not harming it. I am not home enough to do that, so it would end up caged in my guest bathroom for something like eighteen hours a day, and then be visited by the one keeping it prisoner for an hour or so.
I will not do this to an innocent cat merely because he currently lives outside.
So, the trap is now in my garage. We'll see if he comes back sometime when I'm not living at work, and maybe I can make the effort to befriend him without trapping him then. But in the meantime, he's on his own.
I had been leaving one side of the trap open and one closed, and putting the bait inside by the closed door, so whatever it was would have to actually enter the trap to get the bait. After the lock bar failure of yesterday, rather than swapping the door I used, I simply left both doors open. And left the bait right in the same place, on the far side of the trap, by the now-open second door. So the target didn't have to enter the trap to get the bait.
This, combined with my realization that while working around 12 hours a day, almost every day, I simply do not have the time to spend teaching a feral kitten that humans are okay. This involves a lot of time spent just sitting in the same room as the kitten and not harming it. I am not home enough to do that, so it would end up caged in my guest bathroom for something like eighteen hours a day, and then be visited by the one keeping it prisoner for an hour or so.
I will not do this to an innocent cat merely because he currently lives outside.
So, the trap is now in my garage. We'll see if he comes back sometime when I'm not living at work, and maybe I can make the effort to befriend him without trapping him then. But in the meantime, he's on his own.