Wednesday, December 16, 12:51am
The last couple of weeks are a blur, with getting ready for colder days in the outdoor enclosures, managing new TNR projects, along with the usual busy cleaning and care schedule. A lot colder, so we now have heaters on continuously in kitten and elderly cat indoor areas. We put hot water bottles and blankets into insulated boxes in the 6 month kitten enclosure. We’re considering wrapping at least the bottom part of that enclosure with clear vinyl, to cut down on wind coming in, but that may not be enough to get us through the snowy months ahead. The 6 month kitten enclosure, which includes a few kitten caring adult cats, is the only enclosure without an indoor space. This is due to the adjacent indoor area being currently filled with younger kittens in cages. Last year we brought all of the kittens in, to stay in their cages for the majority of time, putting them out in the enclosure to play for the warmest hours of the day. However this year, all cages already have residents, so we need a new plan. We do have a cat door in the screen that covers one of the kitten room windows, and we’ve been mostly leaving that open, so that the outdoor kitties can get inside to take advantage of the heater, if they need to.
We lost two kitties last week…one of the Biwako kittens that wasn’t responding to treatment for her upper respiratory infection. Heartbreaking, as this was such an affectionate kitten, and we had come to love her dearly. David rode his bike out to the vet with her at 3:00am, which is a testament to his dedication (over a 30 minute bike ride, one way!), as well as our wonderful vet’s, who opened his clinic and did his best. Just a few days later Birdie slipped away, while sleeping in her favorite place near the heater. Her condition had worsened, and we had been expecting this, but it was still very sad for us to see her go. She didn’t seem uncomfortable, so we decided to let her go at home, since she seemed to find the vet’s clinic so stressful. We will all miss our sweet bird!
David and I attended an international animal welfare conference over the past weekend. We divided the days up so that someone could stay back at the shelter to take care of all of the kitties. It was a nice chance to catch up with our friends in animal welfare, as well as to learn some new things at the workshops. I found the workshop on nutrition really interesting, as the presenter talked about the importance of gut health in growing animals. This is a topic we’ve become focused on, after chobi’s difficulties. We were also able to get lots of nice food samples!! After I attended on Sunday, I went out to ARK to visit with Elizabeth for her birthday. One of the presenters came out to visit ARK on Monday, so we went out to look at ARK’s new land, had a tour of ARK and then went out for dinner together in Osaka. I took our visitor to see one of the pet shops near the restaurant, just to show how horrible average pet shops here are. I hate to go inside these places and am always frustrated as well as amazed that people can go in them, while talking about how cute the animals are. As usual we saw puppies and kittens that were far to young to be removed from their mothers and isolated, mostly sleeping in small clear boxes, with only a towel to lie on. There was a monkey circling frantically round and round a cage that would have been big enough for a bird, with large birds in even smaller cages. Sadly, this wasn’t the worst pet shop I’ve seen here. We asked if we could take photos and they of course refused–I suspect they actually called the police, as we saw two officers approaching when we were leaving, though we didn’t do anything at all to be disruptive.
A couple of timely new offers of fostering…lots of folks are returning to their home countries for the holidays, so we’ll need to find new placements for some of those currently in foster care. Gucci went out to stay with Francesca, while his adopter was doing some pre-holiday traveling, and it sounds it all worked out very well. Josie went back to stay at Gina’s, thankfully. Josie needs special care, and having her here along with her sister Alex, who also needs special care, had become quite difficult. Gina is so good with these girls, and we can count on her to give Josie the kind of care that she needs. No other big health worries these days, though Sumi is a bit under the weather. She’s improved after having a few meals of the feline version of Ensure. It’s very easy for her to eat, with her mouth ulcers, and we’d feed it to her more often if it wasn’t so very expensive here–around $14 for one can. Now looking for a way to import it at a lower cost, as it’s only around $4 in the US. We’ve brought Xena, Birdie’s sister, inside to stay with the special needs cats. She is not in a precarious condition these days, but she’s FIV positive, has lost some weight, and we want to do some preventative care.
While David was here on Sunday, adopters came for a visit and chose Wednesday and Hansel. It sounds like they have settled into their new home well, and it’s nice for us to think about them having a whole home to run around in, with lots of attention. When she first came in, I never would have imagined that Wednesday would be one of the first from her group chosen, since she was so unfriendly and scary then. It goes to show that kittens can undergo significant changes in personality as they are socialized, and Wednesday became a very friendly little sweetheart! We also received 4 large boxes of donated cat food on Sunday, which was very exciting, and our fisherman friend stopped by with a kind donation for the kittens that we rescued from near the lake. We’ve received enough spay/neuter donations to pay for 3 cats so far, which we returned, and we decided to rescue one more of the friendly ones. Unfortunately, someone had removed the small shelter that had been put up, so we are meeting with city officials tomorrow to talk about that. It’s just not enough to release the kitties, after spay and neuter, if they don’t have adequate shelter to get them through the winter. We imagine that the attention from our rescue and trapping made someone hope that we would remove all of the cats. Most are just to feral for this, and even if we could remove all of the cats, new cats would just take their places next season. Hoping that the meeting will go well, as every time we resolve these kinds of issues, we move one step closer to public acceptance of TNR.
Finally finished the November photo page! We cannot thank Morgan enough for coming out to take so many amazing photos. I couldn’t include all of her photos, but I’ll slowly be adding more of them to the cats’ individual pages. Also finished making a gallery page of available kitties, which will hopefully give potential adopters and foster caregivers a quicker view of who is available.
