Another cat?

A new cat has made herself at home around our home.

We first met her last Tuesday evening, when we looked out the window and saw her wandering around our property.

Wednesday morning she was still there.  She was super friendly, and when we stroked her we found she was also super skinny.  Honestly, she may not have had too many days left of life.  She desperately needed help.  Ignoring her was not an option.

The problem was that though she was super friendly to us, there were huge tensions between her and our other two cats, Maggie and Kitty.  Giving her a bit of food and letting her simply hang around our property was also not an option -- there would be huge cat fights.  And when Maggie gets stressed by this sort of thing she tends to pee on our beds or clothes (she has already peed once on Mama's clothes on Thursday because of this new cat).

So, we took her inside, fed her, and closed her in our bathroom.

We took her to our vet to see if she was microchipped.  Sadly she is not (why don't people microchip their cats?).  The vet said she is female, and probably around five years old.

We contacted a few vets in the area to see if there are any reports of missing cats like her, put notes in the neighbours' letterboxes, checked the lost listings on LostPet.co.nz, and put a found listing on LostPet.

So far, no sign of her owners.

Mulan and Miya have named her Mushroom (full name Mushroom Soup, short name Mushy).  They are hoping we will keep her.

Our next door neighbours initially said they wanted to keep her, and we took her over to them a couple of times.  But they don't seem to be doing much work to encourage her, and she keeps coming back to us.  They don't seem to have heeded our advice to initially close her inside their house.

Again, that won't work for us.  We don't want cat fights and pee in our beds.

Our best solution for now?  To control the interactions between Mushroom and our (other?) cats, until they get comfortable with each other.  We are locking Mushroom in our bathroom at night (Maggie and Kitty always get locked inside at night), and she goes outside during the day.  We are giving her breakfast and dinner in the bathroom.

If we do keep her, it'll be a slow process to get the cats comfortable with each other.

Oh, here is a photo Miya took of Mushroom a few days ago: