I had no intention of becoming a volunteer cat trapper; I didn’t even know that was a thing anyone could be. I hadn’t really even meant to get so involved with the cats outside our house; I still looked around at the cases of cat food piled in our kitchen, at the piles of cat poop I raked up from the yard every day, and found myself thinking: How did I end up here?
I was outside our house one night feeding the cats, watching them all scramble from their beds to their bowls. A neighbor was walking by and stopped at the edge of the driveway. He lived a few houses south of us, he told me, and had seen me outside with the cats. His name was Ray. He asked: Are you the cat lady?
I made a face. I wasn’t sure.
He said: I have cats in my yard, too. Can you help?
Ray had eight cats living in his yard and his garage. He had started with two but then both of them gave birth. One of them lived inside the ceiling of his garage and was pregnant again already. He called her Little Girl.
I don’t even know how she keeps getting pregnant, Ray said. She never leaves the space inside the ceiling.
I was used to hearing human women slut-shamed; it was new to me that men would call cats sluts.For a week I spent every evening walking down the street to Ray’s house, my traps tucked under my arms. We set the traps together and waited, listening for the sounds of Little Girl descending from the ceiling, for the distinct metal clink of the trap closing behind her. Ray couldn’t stop talking about the cats, how tenderly he cared for them, how they were almost like his family. As we waited, he showed me his old prison tattoos, talked about the drugs he used to use, how proud he was now of his grandkids.
When we finally heard it—the rustling thumps in the ceiling beams, the clink of the trap—Ray was emotional. My girl, he said, peering in at her inside the trap. Little Girl was fluffy and brown, big wisps of fur unfurling around her neck, and in the trap she looked surly, like she couldn’t believe she had been tricked. The rest of the cats were her babies and her grandbabies and her great-grandbabies. She had been doing it for years: going into heat, descending from the ceiling until she was pregnant again. Raising crawl-space babies.
What a strange intimacy it was, all the nights I spent outside Ray’s garage in the dark. He was sweet. I was glad to have met a neighbor, glad to know someone else who was kind to the cats in our neighborhood. That last night at his house I turned to walk home in the dark.
You know, Ray said as I turned, nodding like he had something serious to say before I left. With your figure you could have been a titty dancer.
*
I started responding to other neighbors who needed help: people in my neighborhood, people who messaged me on Instagram or posted on Nextdoor about the kittens they had found under their shed.
By then it was springtime: kitten season. The thousands of stray cats across the city were all going into heat at the same time and kittens were pouring out of them, overwhelming shelters, dying in the streets.
I started showing up at strangers’ houses with two traps in the back of my car. It was almost always women who asked for help with cats, and almost always men—their boyfriends and husbands and teenage sons—who lurked weirdly in the background, acting like it was an inconvenience to have me there, like I had somehow caused them to have stray cats show up in their yard. Like I might be both insane and contagious. Ah, the husbands would say, opening the door when I knocked. You’re the cat lady?
It was true that I was a woman and I was caring for thirty cats, and by that point I was usually driving around with a few cat traps in my car, a few cans of tuna tucked in the glove compartment. I understood I fit the description. But from the beginning I bristled at the term.
Do you get paid for this? people were always asking. Is this your job?
It wasn’t, but I found it more fulfilling than the work I was doing at the food bank, writing content to raise money. At work I mostly stared at a screen and tried to feel like what I was doing made a difference, that it added up into something good. With the cats I could quantify my impact: three cats spayed and neutered, ten cats spayed and neutered, twenty cats spayed and neutered. At home I could see the difference it made: all night we used to hear the yowling, the fighting and mating, the horrible chirps and howls and hisses. Now it was quiet. The female cats, toward whom I couldn’t help but feel extra sympathetic, seemed like they were resting for the first time in their lives.
*
Everyone was always asking what Tim thought of the cats. It was always the first question, before they asked why we had so many cats or how I had gotten involved in helping them or what it was like to spend several nights a week in other people’s yards, catching cats. I could tell someone that I was caring for thirty feral cats, or that last month I had helped spay and neuter over a hundred cats, or that I had just saved nine kittens who would have otherwise been crushed to death, and before being impressed or curious or sad they would raise their eyebrows and say: Hmm. What does Tim think?
Even people who followed me on Instagram, people I didn’t even know. Strangers were always asking me: What does your boyfriend think of the cats?
I hated the implication—that men didn’t like cats, or would begrudge their partner the tenderness it took to sit all night in the driveway, petting the tiny heads of the kittens that kept being born. Or that it mattered, that the most important factor in trying to save the lives of abandoned animals was my boyfriend’s approval. That I would stop if he asked.
More than that I hated that the implication was close to being right. Tim didn’t hate cats—he spent plenty of time with me in the driveway, waving feathered cat toys and petting the kittens, his hands looking enormous against them—but he was dubious about either of us taking on the responsibility of caring for them. It was a large thing to add to our lives. We had been dating for less than a year and newly moved in together.
We set a boundary right away: no cats inside the house. We already had Maggie, my old rescue dog, and she enforced the boundary, snarling at the door when the cats got too close. Over time I stretched the boundary in emergencies: an injured cat resting in the bathroom overnight until his vet appointment in the morning, a few bottle-fed kittens in a crate in the laundry room. Just for a few nights. What does Tim think about that? everyone would ask, eyebrows raised.
As I started trapping more cats, waiting in line at more spay and neuter clinics, meeting other rescuers and fosters and people who had inherited large numbers of feral cats, the pattern kept repeating. All the cat people I met were women. All the women were thinking about adopting another cat, fostering another litter of kittens, volunteering more hours to help more animals. And all of them had the same reason not to: their male partners. I wish! they were always saying, when they had to say no to a cat who needed help. My husband would kill me.
Tim’s hobby was mountain biking and the number of bikes he had took up a whole room in our house. Then the bike chains and helmets and tire pumps gradually took over our house, his spandex jerseys always hung over our kitchen chairs to dry, tread marks appearing on our walls where he wheeled the muddy tires through the house. He left for long weekend races up north and was up at four thirty every Saturday morning for six-hour rides. Everyone was always impressed by his commitment to riding. No one ever asked what I thought.
*
The more nights I spent trapping feral cats all over the city, the more I got hit on, often by men I probably wouldn’t have otherwise met. Expanding your horizons, a friend told me.
I had been trapping with Brad for over a month, working our way through the dozens of cats that had been reproducing for years in the junkyard behind his house. He was finally cleaning it up, finally sorting scrap metal and crushing the rusting frames of old cars, and he kept finding kittens. Litter after litter, their moms all mixing together so we didn’t know who belonged to who. Brad had been working alongside me, learning how the traps worked, texting me updates. I was making daily trips to his property, dropping off the cats that had just been fixed and then catching a few more for the next round. He had started leaving his back gate open for me, so I didn’t have to wait for him. I’m trusting you, he told me, with a friendly wink. I wouldn’t let just anyone back here.
Brad’s texts started straying into other topics: an offhand comment about the weather, his hopes that I was having a lovely day. He was in his sixties, I guessed, and good-natured. He lived alone—just Brad and his junkyard and his forty-eight cats. It wasn’t my job to make any assumptions about his life.
There were eight cats left to spay and neuter. I saw a text from Brad and I opened it without thinking, expecting an update on the newest litter of kittens we were monitoring.
Listen, the text read. I rented a hotel room for the day. If you’re interested.
I stared at the text, waiting for the follow-up message that would tell me he had sent it to the wrong person. Two of his cats were still at the vet. I was supposed to bring them back to him that night.
My phone lit up again. It was Brad. The text said: I can keep a secret ;)
*
The casual misogyny of cat rescue wasn’t new to me. It was the same misogyny I had experienced when I worked at the front desk of a mostly male gym, the same sexism as the office politics at my desk job, just another variation of the low-level fear I kept with me anywhere I walked alone. There was nothing shocking about it.
What I didn’t expect was the way the misogyny was directed at the cats themselves. I was used to hearing human women slut-shamed; it was new to me that men would call cats sluts.
I would arrive to help catch a pregnant stray and the discussion happening around me was about how often that same cat got pregnant again and again, how frequently she was in heat, displaying herself to the male cats. She’s constantly knocked up, they would say. She can’t keep it in her pants!
Men would watch cats in heat, cats holding their butts in the air and shaking their tails, while I set my cat traps with tuna, arranged them to entice the cats so I could get them spayed. She’s shaking it like a stripper, the men would say. This one’s a little whore.
When the men were husbands or boyfriends, their female partners would give them a playful slap. She’s a cat, the women would say. Don’t be gross.
There was something sickening about how easily the word slipped from men’s mouths, how casually they could call a cat a whore. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, ever, to apply the word to an animal. Who else are you calling sluts? I always wanted to ask, knowing that I didn’t want to know the answer. How often?
*
Mini started trying to meow at me, although no sound ever came out of her. She didn’t trust me, not entirely, but when I opened the door with breakfast she would open her mouth at me. I could tell she was young by how perfect her teeth were, how white against the pink of her mouth when she meowed. I was always amazed at how quiet she was, how silently she could sneak around the yard. Mini girl, I would say to her, and she would open her mouth in response.
Once, I got a call about a cat who was actively in labor, struggling, her tiny wet kitten half out of her. I got there as fast as I could and saw a group of men wearing tracksuits, standing around in a courtyard lifting weights on improvised benches, towels thrown over their shoulders. I approached them because I had to. I asked if they knew about the cat, if they knew where she was. That’s our cat, they said, and they told me to leave.
If she needs medical care I can help, I told them. I’ll bring her back.
I explained about spaying, about making sure she didn’t have to keep having kittens, again and again, in their barren, dusty courtyard.
I encountered all sorts of weird confusions about human sexuality and cat biology, and it was absurd to have to sort them out.No, no, they said. That’s just what she does. She’s always having kittens.
She’s a slutty little girl, one of the men said, and they all laughed. One of the men, taking off his track jacket to show just an undershirt underneath, took a step toward me. She’s a slutty little girl, he repeated, and then he nodded toward me. And what about you?
*
When I started trapping cats, I had been wearing a fake wedding band for years to discourage male attention. It mostly hadn’t made a difference in coffee shops or bars, when men either didn’t notice it or didn’t care. But once I was working with cats every man seemed to key in on it right away, to question it. Sometimes I was catching cats in alleys behind businesses late at night. Your husband lets you be out here alone? men would say. Or, if I was in their yard, setting my traps on their little patios, around their grills and piles of firewood, they would be bolder. It was clear their questions had nothing to do with my safety. Married, huh? they would say. What does your husband think of having so many cats?
Does your husband know you’re with another man right now? men would say, and they’d wink, or laugh, or stay straight-faced, waiting for my reaction. In order to help the cats I mostly had to put up with it. The little female cats in heat, desperate and pacing at the edges of alleys, still nursing their last litter and already pregnant with the next, the huge male tomcats stalking them every night, never letting them rest. I would catch the eye of those cats and I would use all my energy to communicate with them, to try to send them a telepathic message: Go get in that trap, sweet girl. I will get you spayed. It will be better than this.
*
Cats are so widely understood as a sign that a woman is single. It’s such a common trope in TV shows and movies: a woman gives up on love, accepts a lifetime of loneliness, adopts a couple of cats. If you use the tax software TurboTax, one of the first questions it will ask is about your filing status: single, married, divorced, legally separated. Each choice has a little cartoon graphic with it: married is a pair of wedding rings; divorced is a scroll of paper, like a certificate; legally separated is a roadway diverging into two paths. Single is a person, standing alone, with a cat.
Sometimes people seem amazed that I’m not single, as if worrying about the stray cats outside my house is fundamentally incompatible with a romantic relationship. Sometimes people seem shocked that anyone cares about stray cats at all, like the cats yowling on the streets could be a talisman against finding love. Like they could put out a bowl of cat food and instantly be doomed.
And single, as it’s signaled by cats, is also supposed to imply sexless. Which means that men—even in joking, unserious ways—will simultaneously slut-shame a stray cat for the biology that forces her to seek out a mate, and stereotype as sexless any woman who scoops up that stray cat for a trip to the vet. Too much sex, not enough sex.
I encountered all sorts of weird confusions about human sexuality and cat biology, and it was absurd to have to sort them out: the men who didn’t want to neuter cats because then they couldn’t “enjoy life with the females,” the women who thought it was funny to watch a female cat scream as she was mounted by a male. All of it was tangled up for me with the way men spoke to me about cats, or to cats about me. Come here, Fluffy, men would say when I was there to scoop up the newest litter of stray kittens born under their deck. This beautiful young lady is here to help you.
Women sometimes seemed embarrassed to see cats in heat, twisting their hands and turning red when they described to me what the cats in their backyards were doing. I don’t know what to do about the black cat, a woman would say to me. We raised her first litter of kittens, but she keeps doing it again, she’s out there every night, she won’t stop. Her husband snickering in the background.
The other women who trapped cats with me seemed embarrassed sometimes too, like they had gotten suckered into helping cats but understood they now fit a stereotype. For some women it was a point of pride; they wore T-shirts that said Crazy Cat Lady and made jokes about kicking their husbands out to make room for more cats.
The male cats who had never been neutered would show up looking like old teddy bears, their cheeks inflated over time from testosterone, their necks and faces scarred from years of fighting. Their floppy cauliflower ears. He’s such a boy, women would say, when a feral tom was puffed up and angry in a dark alley, defending his space, on guard. So aggressive. I was always explaining to people that those male cats spent all their time fighting and fathering kittens, that their lives could be so much softer once they were neutered. No, men would say, as offended as if I had suggested neutering all human men. He spends all his time mating? Good for him.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson. Copyright © 2025 by Courtney Gustafson. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
