Please Stop Playing with Feral Animals.

People reveal themselves in social media, and other people reveal how they indulge others.  But this idea of grooming, feeding and entrapping wild animals, then later, setting them "free"...

Please city folk.  Stop with your farm fantasies.  It's ok when you just involve people, because you can hire others to do the necessary work, and even clean up after you.  Old farmhouses with poor pipes... somebody can keep rodding the pipes if you're not going to invest in replacing them.  (That's why many people don't invest in aesthetically old homes but "gut them" or tear them down to build more solid buildings for 21st century technology needs, as well as new sewer pipes and wells.)

But you don't "temporarily" take animals in as your own (and make no mistake, once you trap them inside your interior buildings, even out- buildings, you've altered them by "humanizing" them already -- that's why we teach even very young children in the country never ever to mess with ferals they "find", and play with the babies or disturb the nest thinking everything will ... "go back to normal" once the humans are done "playing."  (hat tip to John McWhorter's recent encouragement of "quote marks" in his NYT column...)

Maybe read more, and fuck with the wildlife less?

Those fun "haircuts" and "meet the grandkids" sessions to clean up the "ugly duckling" are likely going to lead to the feral creature's early death... matting might not be pretty, but it likely would have helped keep the critter warm in his natural settings when he has to find shelters after being placed indoors, in people places, for a time... then rejected and put outdoors again, where he will compete with the more "favored" indoor-outdoor kept cats who enjoy humans feeding them all winter, to keep them artificially stronger to prey on the true wildlife going it alone...

Hopefully, the people will pop a pipe soon, the humans will have their own health issues to attend to, or another grandchild to busy themselves with "raisin' ", and they'll leave nature alone out there already.  She really does better without the temporary "human help" putting their fingers on the scale here and there determining who will live and who will die this winter.  Sadly, that's a human pleasure not afforded to those living more naturally and freer.