A week of vetting

A few days ago I was contacted by someone looking for help with a cat she is feeding outside while the homeowner is away, he showed up with a terrible wound and she didn't know what to do. Thankfully Mugsy the street cat lived in the east end so I went over with a trap and after meowing at me for a minute, he went right in.  We rushed him off the vet and he is now being treated for a very bad abcess.  Mugsy is older and already eartipped and of course he needs dental so now we are waiting for his person to return home. 

And lately I've been noticing Pseudo showing up late or not at all and with wounds so I was able to scoop him and take him into the vet.  Bloodwork was normal thankfully but he had lost weight and had a number of wounds.  I'm trying to figure out if he's fighting and with who.  For now he's getting a bit of R&R, we were hoping maybe he is friendly but so far he's not responding to life inside, but he certainly is eating well.  We will let him wait out the rain and enjoy some regular meals, and then next week I will take Floppy in to get him vetted and see how friendly he is, he might be the bully, it's so hard to know I don't see any fights.

When you start TNRing a young colony you don't think about the future but here we are many years later and the challenge for these ones is taking care of them in their old age.  I'm sure most of us who started feeding feral cats never expected them to live to be 10+.

Butch is a lap cat

Well Butch is not just a sweetie but a lap cat!  He seems very happy to be inside, eating up a storm and chatting away...

 From the bad cat files, we have a picture of what Jack (one of my catsitting clients) was up to when I wasn't there.

 And one of mine took advantage of a fridge door open too long!

Our trapping results!

Well we had a pleasant surprise, even though Butch looks rough he is not that old (maybe 4 max) and in good health!  He's FIV/FELV negative, and his teeth are fine, he just has a few wounds that need to heal up.  First indications are he's a sweetie!  Yay for Butch!

Thankfully momma cat moved her kittens into a shelter before this nasty cold snap.  We trapped one more female there this week so in total last week we trapped seven males and seven females, not too shabby.  Unfortunately winter has returned so no trapping this week, poor cats must have thought spring had arrived.

How about a dozen trapped instead!

Well my precision plan kind of went out the window yesterday.  We showed up at our first stop, a lovely man named Peter has been feeding a colony for years, almost all black and white.  We set up trap after trap and they just kept going in, we got six in forty-five minutes!  Unfortunately that was all the empty traps we had with us or I'm sure we could have got more.

Within minutes they were up eating on the deck.  Every colony is so different, some scatter as soon as you trap one.  With only limited appointments we cancelled our next two stops and took this crew up to the recovery centre.

Peter called me later in the day to say one of the cats we hadn't trapped had just given birth in a planter!  It's clearly kitten season.  We went off to a new west end location and it was far more challenging, but we got another six there!  Ten appointments, thirteen cats, oops, but thankfully TAS took them all to be spayed and neutered.  Now we wait to see how many male and how many female and how our battered tom is.

One down, nine more (or more) to go

March means it's time to get trapping, our weather has felt more like spring, and we already have reports of pregnant cats.  We have ten appointments for Tuesday and multiple locations, so we started tonight and trapped this guy.  He has really bad eyes but seems tame so let's hope we can get him fixed up.

I prepared a detailed plan for tomorrow, with trapping every hour on the hour, starting at 8 a.m. and home probably 12 hours later!