Last night my son (12) woke me up at about 2am telling me there was a random cat in our kitchen hiding behind the mixer on the counter. We’ve seen this cat in the back garden occasionally.
Thing is, we have 3 cats and the cat flap had been “in only” to round up our herd and then locked for at least 6 hours at this point. There are 3 doors into the kitchen. One is shut at night and my son had all the cats sleeping in his room which is just off a corridor next to another door to the kitchen. He woke up hearing one of them trying to get out of the flap only to discover scaredy-cat. He managed to shut our cats in his room and open the back door but by this time scaredy-cat was stuck behind the mixer and couldn’t move.
I think it had been hiding in the back of a cupboard that was slightly ajar for goodness knows how many hours.
When I went to investigate, there he was, utterly terrified, screwed up as tightly as he could in the corner of the counter. He growled and spat as I slowly moved everything from in front of him to let him get to the wide open back door. He couldn’t move so I tried to gently edge my walking stick behind him but he still couldn’t move and attacked the stick.
I got a plant sprayer and sprayed water at him from a distance. He growled and hissed and dashed off the counter and … into the covered cat litter box. Aah! I quickly covered the entrance and my son slid it along the floor (cat still growling, hissing and lashing out) to the back door where he slunk out of the box and dashed off.
Blimey! My poor son was in tears as he’s never seen such an “angry” kitty before so we chilled out for a bit and I explained how terrified the cat had been before going back to bed, the other cats didn’t come into contact with scaredy-cat so they were thinking, cool time to get up. My husband slept through the whole saga, bless him.
Is there any was to discourage random cats from coming in other than taking up any cat biscuits left out when the flap is open? I doubt if scaredy-cat will be back but there’s a different cat that came in and got stuck on “in only” a couple of weeks ago but this one just politely waited at the back door until I opened it for him.