Need advice from a cat whisperer!

[allthingsinmoderation]

A beautiful cat has been coming to my garden/house for weeks now,he is quite thin and doesnt have a collar. He is begging for affection,crying a the windows ,doors and catfalp. We didnt feed him or encourage him at all. After a while we wondered if he was lost or stray so took him to the vet to be scanned for a microchip. Vet said he was chipped and owners live locally but wouldnt give any details about owner. First thing this mornings it back crying at the windows and catfalp ,begging for attention. My cat is very territorial and is distressed and some aggressive standoffs have occurred in the garden. Im worried violence will ensue! Whats the best course of action?
Would it be unreasonable to try to find the owners ?

One near me sounds very much like that, down to being very skinny and the thyroid. One family used to put a saucer of milk down for him, then they moved away. There was a bit of a time gap between them going and someone else moving in, but the cat didn’t understand that they’d gone and used to sit outside waiting for his milk. People who didn’t know the backstory were always taking him to the vet or putting on Facebook that they suspected the family who moved away had abandoned him, and his actual owners were getting a bit annoyed with it.

I know he has owners because we took him to the vet to be scanned for a microchip because i thought he might be lost. The vet couldnt give me their details but they live locally and came to collect him. What the situation is at home i dont know though.

It's very unlikely that they bothered to go and pick him up promptly from the vets but they aren't bothering to feed him. Some cats just like going on visits (probably because so many people are suckers who fall for their poor-starving-me routine).

We are very lucky that our cat isn't the sort to go out visiting because he'd be severely overfed. If you ask him he's never been fed in his life.

Some cats with CKD look very thin and are on medication to increase their appetite because they don’t want to eat. The thing is they will cry for food and when it’s put in front of them they feel nauseous and don’t eat it.

Cats can exist in the same space without attacking each other and some like the company and ‘call for’ other cats. However, if your cat doesn’t like it, get them to chase off the other cat, with your supervision of course. Allowing a cat to assert their territory is probably the best way to make sure the visits are less frequent. Alternatively spraying the cat with cold water (a little from a bottle rather than full-on hose pipe) every time they visit will put it off.

Can you ask on the local FB group if anyone has a microchip scanner or get one from Amazon c.£17? Then you could find out who the owner is and get some background info on poor puss

We had a beautiful snowy Bengal that kept coming into our garden and trying to get into our house. He would sit outside the door crying, but like your cats, mine did not get along with this particular visitor (there's a few cats they allow into the garden and interact with). We tried completely ignoring him and that didn't work, so in the end, everytime he came I would flick a bit of water at him (not loads, literally just wet my hands and then flicked the water off at him) and he soon got the message that he was not welcome. Normally I can rely on my own cats to sort out any unwelcome guests, but they were terrified of this one as he was very aggressive to them. Given he was a Bengal, I'm surprised he was bothered by the water tbh, but I am relieved it worked as I was worried that he would hurt or scare away our cats.
Maybe you could try something to deter him that won't affect your own cat.

This is what I always did with "strays". Write a note on a small piece of paper, fold it over several times then slip it around their collar and fasten with elastic (around the ends of the paper not the collar) asking them to contact you.
However, if he has no collar and the vet knows he is a "scrounger" then I don't know if there is much more you can do.

Anyone can scan a cat but they need to be able to log in to the relevant database to access the details, and then they still can't disclose the information to the finder.

Interesting, that makes sense. I hadn’t thought it through