How to approach a street cat

There is a tabby who sits on the low wall outside the chip shop at the end of my road. For about a year I got her completely wrong. I would come at her from the front with my hand out, making the noise people make at cats, and she would drop off the wall and go under a parked car. Then I stopped walking at her. Now she comes to me.

Almost everything that goes wrong between a person and a street cat happens in the first four seconds, before anyone has touched anything. The good news is that the fix is not a talent. It is a short sequence you can learn in one afternoon, and it works on nearly every cat that was ever going to say yes.

Read the cat before you move a foot

A cat is a predator that is also small enough to be prey. It reads a standing human coming towards it the way you would read a horse trotting at you in a narrow lane. Before you decide anything, stop where you are and spend ten seconds looking at her tail, her ears and how her weight is sitting.

One caution about eyes. Wide pupils can mean a cat is worked up, but they also just mean it is a dim evening under a shop awning. Judge with the tail and the ears, and treat the eyes as the tiebreaker.

The greeting, in the order that works

1. Stop about three metres short. Do not close the gap. This is the part people skip, and it is the part that does the work.
2. Get low. Crouch or sit on the kerb, and turn your body side-on rather than square to her. A human standing over a cat, front on, is the exact shape of something that hunts her.
3. Look at her softly, blink slowly, then look away at something else. A long unblinking stare is a threat in cat. A slow blink is the opposite of one.
4. Put one hand out low and still, index finger extended, at roughly the height her nose would be if she walked over. That finger is standing in for another cat's nose, which is how they greet each other.
5. Say nothing, or very little, and keep it quiet. Talking at a cat is mostly for your benefit.
6. Wait. Every one of the last three metres should be hers, not yours. If she sits down halfway and looks at you, that is fine. Waiting is not failing.
7. If she reaches your finger, sniffs it, and then rubs her cheek or the side of her head along it, you have permission to touch her.

If she does not come, that is an answer as well, and it is a perfectly good one. Take it and walk on. The cat you leave alone today is the cat who watches you from the wall tomorrow instead of the cat who goes under the car.

Three seconds, then ask again

When you do get to touch a cat, touch the parts of her that are built for it. Cats generally like being stroked around the head: the cheeks behind the whiskers, under the chin, the base of the ears, the flat of the forehead. Most do not want your hand on the belly, the base of the tail, the legs or the paws, however much the belly looks like an invitation.

Then use the three-second rule, which is the standard in a lot of rescues and the single most useful habit here:

• Stroke for about three seconds.
• Take your hand away and put it back where it was.
• If she pushes her head into your hand, headbutts it, or steps closer, she is asking for more. Carry on for another three seconds.
• If she sits still, leans back, looks away, or simply tolerates it, you are finished. Stop there.

It sounds fussy written down. In practice it is the difference between a cat who puts up with you and a cat who starts looking for you.

The signals that mean stop now

Cats give notice before they use their teeth. People miss the notice because it is quiet. Take your hand off and sit back if you see any of this:

• The tail starts flicking, thumping or swishing.
• The skin along her back ripples or twitches under your hand.
• Her ears flatten, or rotate out to the sides.
• She goes suddenly still, in the way that is nothing like relaxed.
• Her head turns towards your hand, or towards where your hand is going.
• The purring stops mid-purr.
• Any growl, hiss, or short low sound at all.

The things never worth doing

• Never corner one. Always leave her an obvious way out. Do not approach a cat in a doorway, at the dead end of an alley, in the corner of a yard or under a parked car. A cat with nowhere to go stops running and starts fighting.
• Never chase or follow. A cat that walks away has answered you. Following her is asking the same question louder.
• Never pick one up. Not even a friendly one. You have no idea whether she is sore somewhere, pregnant, or halfway home to a family who are wondering where she is.
• Never use food to move a cat. Not across a road, not out from under a car, not away from a spot she has chosen.
• Never step onto private ground. A garden, a driveway, a yard behind a gate. She is not a stray in her own garden. She is at home, and you are in it.
• Never wake a sleeping cat to say hello. Nobody enjoys that.
• Do not put your face near hers. Even a cat who likes you has no reason to expect a face that size arriving at speed.

Where you stand matters as much as how

Crouching in the road to greet a cat is the most common way a good intention turns into a bad afternoon. Do not kneel in a live lane, on a blind bend, or tucked beside a parked car where a driver coming round cannot see the top of your head. Do not call a cat towards you across a road, ever, even a quiet one. If she is on the far pavement, admire her from where you are and keep walking.

Gardens are the other line. A cat sitting on a wall between two gardens is on her own patch, with a bowl and a radiator somewhere behind her. Stay on the pavement side of the wall. If someone comes out of the house, you want to be the person who stopped to say hello to their cat, not the person who was in their side return.

Work out whose cat this is

Most cats you meet outdoors are owned. They are not lost, not hungry, and not looking to be rescued. A few small things tell you a lot:

• A collar, obviously, though quick-release collars slip off all the time, so no collar proves nothing.
• Condition. A glossy coat, a body with some weight on it, clean ears and clear eyes usually mean someone is feeding her properly.
• A tipped ear. A small flat cut off the top of one ear, usually the left, means she has been trapped, neutered and returned under a local programme. She is a community cat. Somebody is already keeping an eye on her.
• Distance. A genuinely feral cat will not come to your finger and will not want to. She was not socialised to people as a kitten and a pavement is not where that changes. Watching her from ten metres away is the entire relationship, and it is enough.

Do not feed a cat you do not know. She may be on a prescription diet, she may be diabetic, she may be the neighbour's cat who is on rations for a reason. Feeding also moves cats. It changes where they spend their evenings, and sometimes that means closer to traffic than they were before you turned up with a pouch.

If a cat follows you home

1. Do not let her in, particularly if you have cats of your own. An unknown cat can be carrying fleas, worms or something worse, and needs a vet before she meets anybody.
2. Do not feed her on the step on day one. Food turns a visitor into a resident, and a resident into a cat somebody else is missing.
3. Check for a collar and a tag. If there is a number on it, ring the number.
4. Take a clear photo and post it in the local lost-and-found and neighbourhood groups. Most of these end within a day.
5. Get her scanned for a microchip. A vet practice or rescue will usually do it free and it takes about a minute. In England, owned cats have to be microchipped by law, so there is a good chance of a chip with an address behind it.
6. If nothing comes back, try a paper collar. Write "Am I your cat? Please ring..." and your number on a strip of paper and fasten it loosely enough to tear away if she snags it. It is a blunt tool and it works surprisingly often.
7. If she is limping, very thin, has crusty or weeping eyes, or is breathing oddly, ring a local rescue or vet for advice rather than handling her yourself.
8. If there is no chip and no owner comes forward, the route is a rescue, not your back garden. They can check her over, neuter her, and match her to a home that suits her.

Photograph her instead of touching her

The best photograph of a street cat is almost never the close-up you had to earn by walking at her. It is the one you got by standing still, using the zoom, and waiting until she settled and looked over. Cats look their best when nobody is asking anything of them. Get low, keep the camera at her eye level rather than pointing down at her, and let her come into the frame in her own time.

That is more or less the whole loop in PoCats, the free game I make for iPhone and Android. You photograph a cat you actually met outside, the photo is checked to confirm it is a living cat, and she gets cut out of your picture into a card in your album. Nothing draws the cat: the card is your own photograph. There is no advertising in it and paying never changes what you catch. It rewards standing still and being patient, which happens to be exactly what the cat wants from you anyway. It also works perfectly well if you never touch a single one of them.

The tabby on the wall

She still will not let me pick her up, and she never will. That is the correct outcome. She comes to the end of the wall when she hears me on the pavement, she sniffs my finger, and she puts her head into my hand for about four seconds before she has had enough and turns away. Four seconds is a full relationship with a cat. It only took learning to ask instead of announce.

Questions people ask

Free tools for your next cat encounter

Make a keepsake with the cat card maker, using a photo you own. For your next walk, the body language decoder reads a cat's tail, ears and eyes back to you, and the street cat name generator names the one that has been sitting on your wall all summer.

Where this fits in PoCats

PoCats is a cat spotting game: you photograph a real cat you meet, it is checked as a living animal, and it becomes a collectible card cut from your own picture. The catch itself is a two-second timing moment you can try in your browser, and the whole loop is explained here.