Socialising a genuine feral cat is tricky. It requires patience above all else. You can’t push the process. It requires a certain amount of bravery by the person doing the socialisation. On the other side, it requires courage from the cat as well because they have to learn to accept being touched by a human which goes against their instincts.
The cat has to develop trust and to be honest the person has to develop trust in the cat as well. It is a two-way street. Both parties need to have some courage which is present in this short video made at a North Yorkshire wildlife sanctuary.
An experienced volunteer at the sanctuary made it her mission to socialise Tom, a feral cat in their care. It took a few weeks to get to the moment that we see in the video. He lets her stroke him but grumbles at the same time.
Note: This is an embedded video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source or the video is turned into a link which stops it working here. I have no control over this.
Tom has that wide-eyed look of fear but the beginnings of an acceptance that he is okay in her hands and can begin to trust her.
The Whitby wildlife Sanctuary hope that Tom’s behavior will become acceptable to allow him be adopted sometime in the future.
I must say that when I watched this video, I was concerned for both. The woman is taking a risk. She strokes Tom for quite a long time albeit very gently. His expression indicates to me that he might at any minute strikeout. And it would be a pretty devastating strike resulting in scratches and bites and possibly quite a nasty injury.
So well done to the woman. And well done to Tom for accepting it. I’ve seen shelter workers use a toy hand on a stick to simulate being stroked. This acclimatises a feral cat to being touched by a human hand without the human being harmed. It’s an intermediate stage. I don’t think that you can be cautious enough with a genuine feral cat as they can cause real damage.
Most cat scratches and bites heal themselves without infection but some can cause deep and persistent bacterial infections which require a long course of antibiotics and even, in extreme cases, hospitalisation. The latter happens when a person who has been bitten ignores the bite and lets the bacterial infection develop to the point where a hospital visit as an inpatient is required.
RELATED: Cat Bites Signs of Infection
I do hope that Tom gets to the point where he is socialised sufficiently to be adopted. That’s quite a challenge too. I can foresee some problems. This is because you have a cat who on the face of it is domesticated but their feral cat within surfaces, unexpectedly, from time to time to the detriment of the relationship.
It’s hard to eradicate this behavior completely. I think it sticks with a feral cat for the rest of their life and it might undermine a domestic cat’s role as a companion and entertainer to a human caregiver.
There are some more articles on socialising feral cats below.
