Separation Anxiety

From Susan’s Best Friends Network Blog, The Cat Garden.

Up early this morning to get the kittens and cats ready for a while on their own. We currently don’t have any outside help working in the shelter, but generally both of our schedules vary enough for at least one of us to always be here or nearby. Today we both needed to go out to meet a reporter at the park, release Momo while we were there and then I would go on with Naruto and Hinata to the Cat Cafe. Yet another rainy day, so it was a little uncomfortable walking in the park–we asked the reporter to walk with us and talk while we went to Momo’s part of the park to release her. Momo was very excited as soon as we got out of the car at the park, and she cried all the way on the walk to the spot where we first trapped her. It was difficult for me to decide to return her to the park, but the stress from living in the cage was effecting her health. She became a little friendlier over the course of her stay, but it wasn’t going to be easy to pick her up or get medical treatment for her, and I have the scratch marks to prove it. We’d really only taken her to the shelter, because we wanted to remove her kitten from the park while we could still socialize it, and because we had other small kittens from the park that she could care for as well. Now that all of those kittens have grown to over 2 months of age, her work is done. In the end, with so little shelter space available, we need to save it for dependent cats that can’t survive where we find them. Momo was doing fine when we trapped her–good weight, good health–and I’ve seen the feeders stop by her location every time I’ve been out at the park. She seemed very pleased to be back in her familiar territory, and quickly squeezed through the bars of the fence that we think she lives behind. Another cat that looks a lot like her came out to see her but Momo was too interested in checking out all of the smells to take much notice. After watching for a while, we called her, to see if she’d come. She came over and we gave her a chikuwa (a kind of fish sausage), which is her favorite, but she wouldn’t let me touch her. It was hard for me to leave her there, even though that was clearly where she wanted to be. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t know that there will eventually be a cat who will need her space at the shelter desperately. The talk with the reporter included a meeting with the park’s manager, giving us a chance to urge him to put up the informational posters we think will curb abandonment. After the meeting, David went back to the shelter, and Ritsuko and I went on to the Cat Cafe. When we arrived, they asked us to remove our shoes and to disinfect our hands–the same entry procedure that all of their visitors go through. The large room seemed very comfortable for the 8 cats that now “work” in the Cafe, and along with Naruto and Hinata, there were two other kittens waiting for their “debut”. Music played softly, and the lighting wasn’t bright. There were cat trees and shelves for climbing. A few people were swishing cat toys and some cats were engaged in play, while others were lounging on the carpet. We took Naruto and Hinata to the cage the staff had prepared for them to live in until they can be introduced to the other cats. Naruto was very nervous to be there at first, but Hinata rolled around in the cage and started playing immediately. When the staff brought them food, she ate right away, too. It took Naruto some encouragement to finally eat, and he kept reaching out to me through the bars of the cage. I opened the cage door and rubbed his belly, and he relaxed. By the time we left he was snuggling Hinata in the corner of their cage. Another goodbye, but the place looked nice, and the owner looked responsible. At the last animal welfare conference that I attended, one of the speakers started his seminar with the question, “Do you believe that the vast majority of the people wanting to adopt from your shelter can give your animals a better life than you can?” No matter how comfortable we make the shelter, and how much we care about each cat living here, I know that we can never give the cats the amount of attention they’d like or even the amount of space. We have to continuously take a leap of faith and hand over the responsibility of caring for the animals that we have so lovingly cared for. These are animals that once had little or no chance for survival, and now are lucky enough to have a bright future ahead of them. As reasonable as all of that is, it’s often harder to say goodbye than one might think.
See more pictures from today on our Flickr photostream…