Kitten outsmarted me for weeks, but Alex finally joined our family

By David McElroy · December 13, 2022

Over the past few months, there were three kittens behind a restaurant where I often go. One of the restaurant employees adopted the first one when he came up to her months ago. I found out a few days ago that a gold-colored kitten was caught by some young women who adopted him weeks ago, too.

And then there was the elusive little gray tabby who I pursued for at least six or eight weeks. Nobody could touch him.

He was fast. He was smart. One of the kitchen employees wanted to take him home, but he couldn’t get close to him. For weeks, I couldn’t, either.

On Nov. 25, I finally got close enough to him — as he was hiding in a drainage culvert in the parking lot — to snap a photo of him. When I posted that picture on Facebook and explained that I had been trying to catch him, a friend in North Carolina suggested that I get a trap.

A week later, I was still trying to catch him with my haphazard schemes when my friend texted me to say she was sending me a trap. I couldn’t turn that down. She ended up buying one at a chain store with a location about two miles from the restaurant.

The next day, I picked up the trap and headed out to catch a cunning kitten.

The first trap didn’t work. He walked into the trap and started eating — with his paws firmly resting on the trigger plate. The trap simply didn’t work properly.

Fortunately, the bundle that my friend had gotten contained two traps. The smaller one worked. Roughly an hour after trapping started, I had an angry little gray tabby in a trap. If it hadn’t been for Susan, I wouldn’t have had the trap — and I might not’ve ever caught him. (You can see the first photo I got of him, as well as one of him in the trap, at the end of this article.)

But the little guy wasn’t through outsmarting me. When I got him home, I removed him from the trap and made a short video to introduce him to my Facebook friends. Then I went to put him into the large dog crate where he was going to live until I could get him to the vet.

He slipped out of my arms and escaped into a part of my house with a lot of junk that needs to be sorted (and probably thrown away). I was afraid to move too much around — for fear of hurting him.

For two days, he eluded me — inside my own house. I left the trap out again. After two days, he was finally hungry enough to get caught by the trap. And that’s when everything changed.

He made his first trip to the vet the next day. He’s only 4 pounds, but the vet estimates he’s at least 6 months old, possibly as old as 8 months. He’s going to be small.

Over the last week, he has slowly transformed himself from a scared stray into a loving and confident member of the family. Thomas isn’t thrilled about accepting him as a little brother. Lucy has mostly steered clear of him.

I finally named him Alex. It’s short for Alexander. He’s so confident that he seems like a little conqueror who’s come into the household to take over. It eventually seemed natural to name him for Alexander the Conqueror.

When I put Alex and Thomas together, Alex wants to reach out and embrace his big brother, but Thomas won’t allow much of that yet. And even though Lucy has mostly steered clear, they got close on my bed Tuesday evening — and Alex eventually pounced at her tail once.

A startled Lucy took off, not knowing what to do about the little banshee who was accosting her.

Most of the cats I’ve had over the last 15 years have been too feral to know how to play, but this cat is quickly picking up how to play. He’s amazing. He’s confident. And he’s come to be the new king.

I was already pursuing this little fellow well before I knew that Merlin’s death was imminent, but especially after Merlin died, I was very happy to welcome Alex. Thomas was upset to lose his only real friend when we lost Merlin, so I thought it would be good for him to have a new friend.

Alex has been with us for only 10 days, but it’s already starting to seem as though Alex might be the new king to replace the recently deceased king. He has the same air of royalty and confidence that always made Merlin special — so I like to think he’s continuing a tradition.

I hope that Thomas and Alex will soon be friends. I hope that Lucy will become comfortable playing with Alex and they’ll start napping together. But whether those things work out the way I want or not, we already have an amazing addition to the family.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a kitten or puppy in the household — and it feels very right. The confidence and rambunctiousness of youth is infectious.

I think Alex is going to be a good influence on all of us, including me. As I’ve said before, they rescue us just as much as we rescue them. It’s been a joy to have this little boy brighten up the house. I’ve needed him, even though I didn’t know it.

Welcome home, Alex.

Note: The first photo below is the first picture I was able to get of Alex, on Nov. 25. The next is from eight days later, Dec. 3, when I used a trap to catch him. The third photo is about a week later, when Alex spontaneously reached out to put a paw around his new big brother’s neck. You can see more photos of him on our Instagram page.

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It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

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