Teifa has gone home! (and other updates)

On Sunday, I drove out to Yakima to meet Teifa's adopters. They're a really lovely couple from Seattle who are sending daily updates and being very patient with her skittishness. I'm so happy that this ridiculous dog found a family who deserves her.





What else has been happening, let us see...

(WARNING! Not all these updates are nice, sensitive souls may want to skip the first paragraph below. MJ I'm looking at you)



I took in a day-old bottle baby orphaned by a terrific wind storm. The poor thing died two days later, making it the first casualty under my Fuzz Ball Animal Rescue (unless you count Ranger, the hound dog that had wandered around the countryside for a week after being shot in the head three times and by the time a kind stranger brought him into the vet basically his entire skull was full of infection. Technicaly that happened before I founded the rescue). This was followed by a woman with low-income calling asking for help with her aggressive, outdoor-only-no-way-I-can-keep-him-inside, fight-starting, snotty FeLV-positive cat that she could no longer keep. I paid for his euthanasia over the phone without even meeting the woman or the cat or the vet. I have mixed feelings about this.


Meanwhile, the same storm blew off a third of our roof and broke the front gate and couple of my planters. Now we have a brand-new roof! Yay insurance!



I had four kittens in my bathroom for a couple of weeks. One's been adopted, the other three went to a foster home last night.

I almost had to have eight puppies in my house, but luckily the bosses allowed them to stay at the clinic while I arranged transport to a shelter in a more populated area. Note to people who have an urge to leave their 8 puppies at the back door of a vet clinic in the dead of night: we would have helped you with these puppies anyway. Call first next time.

I currently have one cat in my garage. He was a stray, and supposed to be a "cheap turnaround"; I give him some TLC until he got over his URI; neuter; vaccinate, and then adopt him out for a reasonable fee that covered his costs. So of course he had to have a defective salivary gland that caused saliva to back up into the tissues under his tongue, making a water-balloon the size of my thumb that required surgical removal of the gland to fix. This is pretty much the same thing that happened with Pirate Jane, the calico that needed to have her eye removed. (She's also been adopted, by the way).

On the other hand, I'm finally getting my act together and putting together the paperwork to become an official non-profit. Tax-deductible donations here I come!

I'm also on a roller derby team. Three, two-hour practices per week, and a bout one Saturday each month. And if you read that and had a thought akin to, "hmm, roller derby sounds frivolous compared to other stuff she could be doing", let me assure you that getting aggression out several times a week is worth the time spent, and it's cheaper than a gym membership.

Between a full time job, including working one to two Saturdays per month, rescue, roller derby, bonding with my husband over Diablo III several hours per week, gardening, hiking with the dogs. photography (which I will get up online one of these days), and all the stuff I plan to do, like go fishing, and maybe actually make some art one of these days, and get back into agility with my dogs... I'm a busy lass.

Which is to say, I suppose, sorry I haven't been updating the blog very much.

How has the last four months been for the rest of you?

Updates are sometimes boring

Hello out there!

Things:

1) Kozmo was adopted! He now lives with two little girls and they love him. He has been renamed Jean Ralfeo Buster. Which I think is what happens when a 6 and an 8 year old are forced to come up with, and agree on, a name.

2) I picked up another foster cat, an adult this time. Mr. Whiskers was apparently abandoned in a neighborhood here in town. He showed up one day about three months ago at someone's house and there have been no responses to ads in the local classifieds, CL, or the local shelter. The Good Samaritan brought him in to the clinic to treat a small facial abcess and we got to talking and, well, one thing led to another. He loves people and was already neutered, and uses a litter box like a pro. All I have is this video because, damn, black cats are difficult to photograph! Especially ones that try to cuddle with you every time you try to get at their level with a camera. I already have a family interested. Thank doG, because Tom and I like him so much we talked about keeping him.



3) Today Tom and I went and helped with some chores at my favorite local dog rescue, and accidentally came home with a foster dog.

Holly is one of those dogs that is so extremely adoptable everyone is scratching their heads as to why we still have her. She has it all: good with adults, kids, dogs, cats. Crate trained, house trained, playful without being crazy, quiet but not shy, not too big or too small, very cute with striking markings. She looks like an over sized Basenji.

You are sad that you don't have her. Get in line to adopt her now before the list gets too long.

The Latest Project

Found on a nature trail and brought into the clinic by a good Samaritan.

I think he's a male, but not positive; tiny kittens are difficult to sex. His eyes should open any day now.

Judging by the area he was found, his mother is probably a feral. She may have been startled and dropped him, or was planning to return to get him later. So we'll never know if he was truely 'abandoned'. But you never know. We had another 'orphaned' kitten brought in a few months ago where the mother (a feral, though apparently healthy) left one of her kittens in a bush near an apartment and didn't come back for over 24 hours. A person couldn't stand looking at it anymore and took it in and started bottle feeding. Three days later the mother returned to the bush and sniffed around like, "huh, didn't I leave something here?"

Maternal instinct is a variable thing. At worse, he was saved from being a feral cat. I told him, on his first night here, as he spat out the rubber bottle nipple over and over and cried for the real thing, that life is tough sometimes and he would just have to get used to it and things would work out. Maybe he understands this, because now, two days later, he thinks formula and rubber nipple are just fine and dandy.

He'll be ready to go to a new home in five to six weeks.




Me: "Will you hold him while I make up his bottle?"
Tom: "Will he poop on me?"
Me: "He can't poop on his own yet. So unless you plan to lick his genitals to stimulate that, you should be fine."
Tom: "Wasn't planning on it."

I think this is irony

My pet cat knocked my National Geographic off the table, and then scratched and pissed on the (excellent) article about animal domestication.

I'm just biased because I like cats

When I was little, my dad came home with two female kittens he'd picked up from a neighbor's barn litter. I got to name them and, being two years old at the time, named one "Deedah" and the other "Neenah". They would be just about the only ones of our many, many cats for the next few years who would ever get names.

This would've been around 1986. Back then it never even occurred to my parents to allow cats in the house, let alone to take them to the veterinarian. The dogs got their yearly rabies shot and got to sleep in the the kitchen during a thunder storm, but even that was pushing it. Neenah and Deedah were never spayed, of course. By the time I was six or seven, we'd lost count of the exact number of their descendants cats we were feeding every night. It had to be at least thirty. We went through a lot of cat food, but it was the cheapest you could buy so we didn't mind.

It was common activity for me to dress up in long sleeves and heaving ski gloves and try to catch the kittens that always seemed to be in perpetual supply. Sometimes I'd catch one that didn't immediately try to rip my face off and I'd be delighted and would sneak it inside for a few hours to play. Later I realized these were probably the kittens that were so wormy and diseased they were too lethargic to fight.

If a cat got hit by a car, or got too sick from whatever disease was running through the population that week, dad would wait until my sister and I were distracted inside by a cartoon or something and then he'd shoot them with his .22 revolver and bury them next to the creek if they'd had a name or drop them in the trash if they didn't.

We didn't, you see, put much value on a cat. And most of our friends and neighbors in my small, rural town felt the same way.

Then, one day, my fourth grade class had a visit from a nice lady from a place called the "humane society". She brought in a dog that we got to pet, and handed out brochures for us to bring home to our parents, and told us about such strange things as "spaying" and "vaccinations" and "adopting pets". She didn't scold, she just... educated. I loved animals (what kid doesn't, really?). I couldn't have articulated it at the time, but I loved being shown a better way to care for them. I wanted to do the right thing for the creatures under my stewardship.

Coincidentally, this eye-opening lesson occurred about the same time that, through a combination of coyotes, horned owls, disease, and old age, we suddenly found ourselves with no more cats to feed. It took about a year of begging and wrangling, but my sister and I finally convinced dad to let us get some more cats. This time from the humane society.

When we adopted our kittens, we got even more pamphlets and brochures. We not only payed money to get the kittens (unheard of!), we spent more money to get them neutered and vaccinated. Suddenly, these animals had value. We worried about them getting sick, or running off, or getting eaten by a coyote. After more begging, they were allowed indoors whenever they wanted. They slept in our beds at night. They got a monthly flea treatment. And canned food. They had carefully-chosen names, and a file at the veterinarian with their picture on it. We started to take photos of them. (Seriously, I can count on one hand the number of photographs of Neenah and Deedah. Of Trouble and Henry, there are dozens).

They were valued members of the family. There were no more barn cats, and visiting strays became rare. Just a few years prior we'd had what could have been classified as a feral cat colony. A Problem with a capital P. Although we never seemed to have a shortage of songbirds, lizards, frogs, snakes or any of the other wildlife that feral cats are supposed to decimate, but that's just the layman's observation of a kid. (Albeit one who spent a lot of time around the property chasing and sometimes catching these critters). And it was directly a result of putting so little value on our pet cats. It wasn't because we didn't like them, it was plain old-fashioned ignorance.

I think I've made it clear that I'm a fan of the No-Kill movement. Some people dislike that it promotes Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) of feral cats. There are various arguments against TNR, some of them valid. I don't think it will work in all areas, but few people who promote TNR actually think that anyway. I think it would have worked well on my family's little colony, had we known about it back then. Some of the kittens could have made fine pets with a little socializing, the rest could have continued living their lives after being sterilized and died of natural causes (which is what they did anyway). Was it the best life a cat could have had? Heck no. Do I think they'd have preferred to live it than be dead? Yes. Did they kill wildlife? Yes. Did they decimate local wildlife populations? No.

TNR isn't perfect, but unfortunately, for most areas, it's the best we have. I think there are a few things that anti-TNR people still don't get:

1) No one (except maybe a few crazy cat people) want there to be any feral cats. Really. We all agree: ultimate goal for everyone = zero feral cats. But we have some now, so we have to deal with them. There aren't that many choices: it's pretty much TNR or death.

Which leads me to misconception 2) killing them isn't going to solve the feral cat problem. Period. Sorry, it just won't. Sure, it might work in some places in the short term (and based on the comments from frustrated bird-lovers, killing them is also satisfying in schadenfreude-like way), but long-term we are only going to stop producing feral cats if we as a society put more value on the cat in general (feral or not).

The anti-TNR stance has a common thread: there is an attitude that killing cats is "down to earth" and "realistic" versus the "rainbows and butterflies" of the crazy, fluffy-headed cat people who support TNR. Bullshit. You want to talk "realistic"? I forced my way through my husband's textbooks when he was getting his business degree. You don't get more "realistic" (or dry) than freaking economics. After all, it's become pretty clear by now that healthy, adoptable shelter animals in general are being killed because of no more than a marketing problem. Cats are no different. And if your ultimate goal is to increase customer perceived market value, it seems pretty stupid to publicly devalue your commodity to the point that you're trying to get taxpayers to pay to destroy it.

Realistic means you don't take the sort-term, momentarily satisfying action. It means taking the less-satisfying, more frustrating and difficult long view. That, to one degree or another, is going to involve a whole lot of TNR.

some confusing links for a confusing week

"Meat... you're right in liking it"

How to naturally sweeten your milk

Goat bagpipe

How to pet a kitty

I should discourage this

... instead, my first reaction is take a picture.

If at first you don't succeed

One of the main reasons I'm still feeding my cats kibble is because there is small but noticable improvement in their teeth health when they eat their special 'oral care' kibble.

That is, until they went on a diet two months ago. They now think their two small rations a day is akin to torture by slow starvation; they scarf it down like inmates in a North Korean prison. I just noticed yesterday that this involves not actually chewing the damn stuff. Hence, defeating the only positive reason to feed kibble aside from convenience.

So, time to try yet again to home make the cats' food. It was probably only a matter of time, anyway, but this was the last straw. I'm going to try harder this time. And of course everyone says switching off kibble will help with the losing weight anyway (and reduce the risk of diabetes, and increase fluid consumption, etc, etc).

One hundred cats visit Ikea

Because, I guess, why not?

links for a weird Friday

Mobile Phone App Enables Wild Food Foragers


The grandmother hypothesis


Shelly and Jezebel


The luxury of anti-vaccinationism

Moving week Links

The milkman in California still delivers local farm fresh milk

Fugly horse of the day with another great post about abuses in the gaited horse industry

Creative mixed-media art

The Illustration Art blog talks about the stigma of painting/drawing from a photograph rather than life. I rather agree with the author's conclusion.

Aw. Marines rescue kittens: (via Ginmar)

Animal sounds from different countries. (I freaking love onomatopoeia) (via)

Wanted feline

Cat causes car wreck and then vanishes

"Oregon State Police have taken the unusual step of issuing a missing cat alert for a feline that caused a car crash, escaped from a smashed SUV and vanished."

An approximation

Fig. 1: Relative numbers of song bird deaths by various causes

Fig.2: Relative amounts of emotional energy spent on various causes of song bird deaths

Baby the old cat

Baby is a 17-year-old Manx. She's lived with the same woman her whole life. She's outlived 5 or 6 dogs, and survived as many young children.

A few years ago her black whiskers turned white, and she has slight arthritis in her hind legs. Other than that, she doesn't show her age.

this happens sometimes

It's been a frustrating week. Work is being stupid in a boring and personal but frustrating way. My husband is officially moved into our new apartment... five hours away. I'm here in our old place, with nothing but the dog, a futon mattress on the floor, a laptop, and cat hair dust bunnies the size of badgers. My camera memory card is full, but I can't find the card reader to upload to the computer. I also can't find our census form. I'm sure they're going to come knocking on my door any day now and probably arrest me and then who will feed my dog? I also can't find my hiking boots. They're either at my parents' house (to which I will be moving soon) or they're 5 hours away with all my other stuff. Either way, I've had to go hiking in the damp Oregon forests with tennis shoes, which means wet socks.

I hate wet socks.

Anyway, these are some of the last photos I took before everything went to hell:



I sculpted Mr. dragon a few years ago from polymer clay. It was fun (polymer clay usually is), but I skipped important prep work to get to the fun parts, so after it was baked it kept falling apart. I was finally ready to toss him in the trash (it's a big step for me, I'm a horrible pack rat). But before I did, I took photos of him...







... and then ripped off his wings and put them on the cat.




Demon wings look very natural on a cat, don't they?

Intruder!

Yesterday morning, literally just as we were walking out the door to leave for work, I hear this low moaning meow coming from the back of the house. It sounded like (and turned out to be) an unhappy cat. The neighbor's cat. Tucked in the corner of our office. We had left the kitchen door open all afternoon for the breeze, he must have come in and gotten trapped when we shut up the house at bedtime. I don't think he'll be making that mistake again.





He looks content in this photo (yes, I had to take a picture. No, I don't know what's wrong with me). But he was actually quite upset. I also earned myself some extra idiot points for cornering a strange, scared cat and reaching for his face with my bare hand. Luckily his response was to run rather than rip my flesh open.

Ten minutes, two furniture moves, and one small stress-released poo later, and he was out of the house. And I was only a few minutes late for work.

Insolent cat is insolent

Kaida loves napping on Ixchel's aquarium lid. I guess because it's warm and springy like a firm mattress. She knows it's not allowed - I have emptied many a squirt bottle for this behavior. She's already broken one lid. I thought the problem was solved by placing the aquarium high up on a shelf with little room for cats to crawl on top. I was wrong. She will always find a way.

Nori would like to let everyone know that it's not all Zelda, all the time around here.

Although, sometimes, he does have to turn up the 'cute + fuzzy' dial to get some attention.



It works.