Tales of the Feral Cats: Oreo’s Story

Today we reach the final day of the year in an adventure that has gone on for over three and a half years thus far. A lot has gone on over that time – some of it still feeling very surreal. Some things have changed, some things have remained very much the same, and all those usual tropes people throw around this time of year. One thing for me that has always remained constant is something that began over 45 years ago for me, when our family got our first dog as a pet – my love of animals. And so, with that love we have allowed quite the troop to become a part of our lives over these last three years, and this story is about the final member of the magnificent clowder of seven – Oreo.

Oreo is a bit of an enigma as we don’t really know when he started showing up. As I may (or may not) have mentioned in Tux’s story, we didn’t realize that there were two different black and white cats in the group until months after they started showing up and only after more attentive observation. So it could very well be that Oreo had been showing up before Tux, or they could have been together all along, and we just assumed they were the one and same cat. It was well into the first summer that I started to have questions about the wandering Tuxedo. At that point, neither one was particularly friendly and they always kept their distance. Of course I can go back and look at the few rare photos I managed to get of them and easily tell who is who at this point, but back then, it only started with a feeling that something didn’t look right one day when “Tux” was wandering through the back yard. At this point all the cats were making regular use of the ditch the groundhogs had dug under the back side of the fence, so we would routinely see them wander from the front, into the back and under the fence through the ditch. At one point, when watching the black and white cat, I noticed he had a black spot on the back of his left hind leg. Then another time, when he was wandering through, the spot wasn’t visible. Then there were a couple of times where I noticed the face, and one time the white came up to the chin and around the right side of his mouth. The next time, the face appeared all black, and looked a little more rounder than it had before.

So I got suspicious and started looking for these tell tale signs a little more closely. It took a few more weeks, as they tended to be a little more elusive and weren’t visiting at regularly convenient hours like the Orange Trio. But eventually, I was able to determine that indeed there were not one, but two separate Tuxedo cats. Tux had the white patch running up to his mouth, with his black and white hind feet sporting no distinctive spot, whilst Oreo had the rounder, all black face, and that spot on his hind leg. The confirmation was cemented one evening when they both happened to be wandering the street at the same time. They didn’t interact with each other, and each as more wary of the other than anything. One of them headed off past the neighbor’s house where the Orange Trio usually stayed, while the other eventually gave up his stalking and headed through our back yard. At that point, we had already been using the name of Tux, so we kept that for Tux and now had to come up with a name for the second Tuxedo. I had bandied about with Tux II and Edo in my head, but tossed those out in favor of the much better Oreo – for obvious reasons (the original Oreo cookie, and not all these other colors and flavors they have come out with since, of course).

Now that we knew there were two, we were able to make better observations and notice that Tux was definitely coming around a lot more than Oreo, at least during the times we could be home to observe the clowder, naturally. Neither Tux nor Oreo seemed to make use of the food and water left in the business parking lot, or at least not as much as the Trio and Midnight were. We presume they were making their home base in the junk yard, or the woods at the end of the street. I wonder now if they were part of a group or spawned from a group of Tuxedo cats from further down the main road. I just happened to notice a group of three or four of them wandering around a dirt side road one day while driving back to the house. I also wonder if Cookie also didn’t come from this group. Anyway, we were able to spot Tux at least a few times throughout the week while Oreo might be once or twice at the most. After the first winter, and as we entered the second year of watching after the group, I started making notes on the calendar every day we would see the cats. This gave us a broad indicator of their habits and allowed us to track them a little bit. I did it primarily because, as I mentioned in Patch and Scruff’s story, we didn’t see Patch at all for most of the winter, so I wanted to keep some record of when we last saw any of the cats, in case more of them pulled a disappearing act. It also became useful to make note of when other ferals came by, and we were able to pin down a few other very semi regulars.

But Oreo was just the occasional wanderer until we had our sunroom constructed in March and April of ’22. Once that had all wrapped up, Oreo wandered by one day, and hasn’t left since. He took up residence underneath the sunroom, and has been essentially a mainstay with the rest of the household. Once in a great while, we saw him wander off into the woods – usually to chase after one of the other cats, but he had pretty much made our back yard his permanent home. This has allowed me to get him to trust us more, but he is still very defensive and aside from Scruff, is the only one we have not been able to pet on a regular basis. While Scruff just maintains his distance, Oreo will bring out the claws and give a swat if a wayward hand or foot gets a little too close. He will scamper away if we keep approaching, but at this point, he does show more bravery than poor Scruff, and will tend not to scamper too far. For the most part, he stays put when he knows the food bowl is coming. While it’s comforting to know that Oreo is in a safe place and shows no interest in being anywhere else, there have been a couple of drawbacks to this situation.

First and foremost, he definitely has become territorial over the yard and will chase anyone else who wanders into it. He also has had a nasty habit of watching for anyone through the gap in the fence wandering through the street, and will come up to the front porch to stand guard, and eat the food we leave out on the porch for Patch and Scruff. Which brings up the second issue – he’s gotten to be a fat cat, quite literally. To us it seemed to happen overnight, but looking at a few pictures during the summer last year of Oreo handing on the steps of the sunroom, he blew up over the course of the fall and winter. At this point, we have limited how much we feed him to essentially a normal indoor cat portion, but we have to keep careful eye on him when he starts to head up front. He hasn’t been quite as bad as at the beginning, but he knows the food is out there for the all the other cats that come throughout the day. We do get a laugh or two out of it when he assumes the Jabba the Hutt position to do some cleaning, or rolls around like a barrel when we toss him a toy to play with. Which brings up something very interesting about our boy Oreo – he very much wants to be an indoor housecat.

During the Autumn last year, after it was clear that Oreo was a permanent resident under the sunroom, I set up one of the shelters we had made on the left side of the room, opposite the outdoor entryway, and positioned it so he could go in and out from under the sunroom. I remember thinking it was quite remarkable that it turned out that the elevation of the room above the ground was the perfect height to allow easy access to the hole in the shelter. Then I nailed up some extra siding we had left over from the unexpected project of having our house resided, around the three sides of the room to give Oreo a bit more privacy and protection (and to also prevent him from seeing anyone coming through the back yard from the ditch and  wood’s side of the house). So the big boy has his own little slice of territory to call his own. However, during one particularly cold spell last winter, I felt bad for him (especially since his size made it a struggle to through the hole in the shelter), so I let him into the sunroom, which was kept warm by a table top space heater we had bought. Turns out that good ole Oreo had no problems making himself quite a home inside. He quickly learned that a chair cushion was much more comfortable than a pile of hay, and he had no issues with figuring out what a litter box was for. As a result, we would let him in on stormy and cold nights for the rest of the winter and early spring. It got to the point where the first thing he would do when coming in would be to play the with toys we had in the room. He would even sit by the kitchen door and observe our indoor crew coming and going. At one point, they all would come and sit by the door with Oreo on the other side and just hang out, watching each other.

It got to the point where Oreo got so comfortable being inside, I started to wonder if he just hadn’t been an indoor cat prior in his life who had just escaped the house. It took some effort getting Tiger to use the litter box normally, whereas Oreo took to it on the first night. Aside from his defensive swatting, you would never think he was an outdoor cat during those times he was inside. Heck, I often had to coax him out with the food bowl just to get him back outside. Unfortunately, the side effect of having Oreo share the sunroom with the rest of the troop has been trying to fight the massive flea infection we inherited this past summer. Without being able to interact with Oreo physically, we can’t give him monthly treatments of flea medicine, so unfortunately, we can’t bring him in the house any more. I wish I had more time and ability to work with him because I think with more interaction, he will eventually drop that defensiveness and would be able to be a normal housecat and companion as some point in the future. But those pitiful meows he utters when on the sunroom landing and we are just hanging out together are hard to resist. He definitely wants to be inside. I have been contacting every shelter and rescue that I can since Cookie arrived to try to find one that has room for fostering cat, but so far, no one can take any more animals in, and I certainly don’t want any of them going from the freedom of being outdoors to sitting in a cage for who knows how long. I am hoping to make a connection at some point with someone who can take the big boy in and give him the love and care that he needs to become the healthy and happy housecat he deserves. In the mean time, we will be doing what we can for our standoffish, but lovable barrel roll, because at the end of the day, he has really become as much a part of the family as Tiger, Tux, Midnight, and now Cookie have become.