A cat Houdini

I live next to public land which has been left in a natural state in an urban area and soon after moving in, I realised that my house is a magnet for stray male cats. Some are owned tomcats that wander and some are cats that have been abandoned to fend for themselves. I have caught and neutered a few males and I have ended up keeping the homeless ones. You can read about the tomcat that sent me to hospital here.

At the end of August 2017 I noticed that there was yet another tomcat in the vicinity: my cats would fight with him at night, he sprayed smelly calling cards around my front gate and he walked around yowling a lot. The neighbours kept seeing him in their house as well; he would sneak in to eat their cat's food. I found him inside my house once but he escaped before I could catch him. Around the end of October, he was sitting on the roof and I called to him, left food on the roof and he came and ate it. Thereafter, he started coming regularly to be fed and tamed up very quickly, allowing me to handle and stroke him. I noticed then that one side of his pelvis was a very odd shape. He also had an unusual way of walking and seemed a little clumsy.

I shared his pictures on social media in the hope that someone would claim him, but no luck. Because I was broke, I decided to take him to an animal welfare organisation to get him neutered and his pelvis xrayed. When I arrived at the premises of the animal welfare organisation, disaster struck: he slithered out of the cat basket, ran in among the animal kennels and disappeared. Based on his behaviour at my house, I felt sure that he would stick around nearby so I asked the people who worked there if they would try and trap him. They agreed to, but there was no sign of him. Six weeks later, I got a call to say that he had been trapped and I went to fetch him. He had hurt his nose trying to get out of the trap, had an eye infection, was covered in ticks and tick-bite ulcers and generally looked like he had been through hard times.

He was pleased to be home and I put him in my bathroom to recover. A few hours later, I discovered that he had opened a window and escaped, although he soon turned up for food so I just let him be. A few days later, I took him in to the vet to be neutered and X-rayed. It turns out that he had fractured his pelvis badly at some point in his life and yet it had healed remarkably well, even though acetabulum fractures usually don't heal at all without surgery.

After bringing him home, I put him in the bathroom and cable-tied the windows closed. This time he stayed inside but I soon realised that his habit of spraying was not going to go away that easily and my cats weren't keen on him, behaving aggressively towards him, which reinforces the cycle of anxiety and spraying so I had to put him and all the alpha males in the house on medication to calm them down. Amytriptiline works well in these situations. He is spraying less but it's still a work in progress so he does a fair amount of "time out" in the bathroom to prevent him spraying all over the house. I hope we will be able to break the habit of spraying over time.

He is about 2 years old and was obviously raised around people and is very affectionate, talkative cat. He has become my devoted shadow and it's really sad to see animals suffer so much because people can't be bothered to neuter tomcats and would rather dump them somewhere once they develop undesirable habits. As for his pelvic fracture, he may have been hit by a car when he was younger so he really has had an eventful life.