Who we are

Cherry Street Cats is me (Robin), my husband Steve, Sandi, Michelle, Verena, Vinyse, Derek, Kent, and Connie, a group of dedicated cat lovers who care for a colony of feral cats in the east end of Toronto. I also have a great rescue team of Lesley, Joanne, and Susan. Together we do our best to make the lives better for feral and homeless cats and kittens. 900+ cats helped in nine years!



Thursday, June 14, 2012

No sugarcoating

This may be a controversial post but when it comes to my moral compass for cat rescue I am sure of its direction and know that although the decision I made was heartbreaking it was the right one.

Jackie has been feeding a couple of cats in the Portlands and I went down to check out the situation.  One of the cats looked pregnant to me so we thought let's try to trap her.  And trap her we did, very easily.  Once I got her in the trap I could tell her nipples were prominent so then I was worrying she was nursing.  Only one thing to do, take her to the vet and find out.

It turned out she was very pregnant, and the vet did a spay abort.  Wait, I can hear the voices of dissent but here's the thing, she is very feral, if she had the kittens, we would have to hope that first of all, we could trap her again and spay her and secondly that we could trap the kittens at the magical socialization age or at least trap them and TNR, all of those things very problematic.  Every day in shelters kittens and adult cats are euthanized due to lack of homes.  It's a harsh reality and making those harsh decisions is part of dealing with feral cats.  

Miss Boots in the trap
Back at the colony, Biff has been having URI symptoms again.  He has had this chronic problem for a while, hopefully some warm dry weather will clear things up.
After such a grim post, here's a bit of comic relief.  This is what I woke up to the other morning.  Remember, this is Buddy, when we adopted him last year the vet said he was five years old, yeah right, what five year old cat shreds toilet paper, we adopted a kitten with really bad teeth.

2 comments:

  1. I think you made the right decision - While it sucks to abort in my opinion it the lesser of two evils.

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  2. Difficult but when so many cats and kittens are looking for homes it doesn't make sense to let more feral kittens be born. Hoping for a time when there are more people waiting to adopt than there are cats available.

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