Congratulations!

Pt. 1

Pt. 2

I plan to include a lot of pictures and even some video of the cats we have worked with over the past several years. I also want to share with you our experience working with these cats.

My neighbor Elem and myself have set us quite an elaborate system here, and we are always willing to help, and to learn from others.

I have been thinking about doing something about the situation, so I went to the homepage of the Milwaukee Humane Society to see if they had suggestions on the control of these feral cats. They did and I spent the next several hours reading and doing more research. There is a ton of information on their site and by following links, you can learn a lot about the program they support, it is called the Wisconsin Humane Society’s Community Cat Caregiver Program.

What this program does is takes volunteers from the community and has them participate in a program called Trap-Neuter-Return. What they do is supply you with a live trap, the volunteer traps the feral cats and brings them to the Humane Society, where the cat is given an examination, vaccinations, is spayed or neutered, earmarked and microchipped and is then evaluated. If the cat is tame and can be socialized and adopted out, they will keep it, if not, it is then returned to the territory where it was trapped.

By returning the cat to the wild, it holds a stable population in the area, keeping new cats from moving in. These cats are all health checked, vaccinated and “fixed” so they can have no more kittens. The males are also less aggressive and will not “spray and the females will not go into heat, causing the loud “yowling” to attract males.

The volunteers are tasked with the trapping and transport for treatment, as well as monitoring the size and status of the cat colony in your area and providing food and basic care.

In areas that have tried to trap and remove the cats (either by removing or euthanizing), they have not seen the population go down, it simply forms a vacuum that draws other cats into the newly abandoned territory. And these new cats are of course not treated medically, so there is a greater risk of them bringing disease as well as new kittens to the area. By keeping the stable population of healthy cats, they will protect their territory, keeping out the outsiders.

I have been so interested in this program since I started learning about it, that I am going to be getting more information, and quite possibly getting involved myself. I stopped in at the Humane Society this morning and have the number of the person running the program, and I will be getting more details this week, then I will be here to bore you all with the details

If you would like to learn more, start here, Wisconsin Humane Society: Help Wild Cats. There are many links off of that page, just start clicking. They have a 39 page document with just tons of information. i sat here and read the entire thing last night while I ignored a bunch of friends in a chatroom, I was that taken in by this program.

By the way, my puppy Pal loves watching the cats in the backyard, he wants to play with them so bad!

I just got a call, none of them will be adoption candidates. No one there can even handle them (but I can) so Monday morning they will be spayed & neutered and I will pick them up Monday night. I will hold them two days before I can release them. The mother of these three kittens is still living in my yard, and while I was caring for them, she was here almost all of the time, I’m sure she will be glad when they come home, and I can release them to her. I think they will be comfortable enough with me that as they grow, they will still see my yard and garage as home… especially if I keep feeding them the good stuff

I went to the store to buy some kitten food, litter box etc., and when i put the food down, she dove in face first, she was that hungry! She is very fuzzy, so it is hard to tell by looking at her, but when you feel her, she is very thin, her ribs and spine are sharp, so she was not doing well, and in this cold, she needed all the energy she could muster so she didn’t freeze.

Here are a few pic’s.

She is more black than the pictures show, when the flash went off, the silver highlights really stand out. She also needs a bath… anyone want to help?

I put a small box between my monitors (I run dual monitors) and she moved right in.

Kitt is not impressed by Pal… as long as pal stays out of the kitty’s box

Kitt is concerned about Brett Favre too! You knew I couldn’t have a cat that isn’t a Packer fan!

My neighbor and I have been working together, and we learned how heartbreaking this can be. We really get attached to “our cats,” as we have been feeding and working with them for some time, my neighbor has been caring for (and naming) many of these cats on his own for years, I have been doing is since last summer. Our “colony” are for the most part, related females. When we joined the Humane Society’s team, we were really looking forward to this, but two of the first three cats he took in (Little Momma & Cheese), tested positive for feline leukemia virus (FeLV), a contagious disease that is spread from cat to cat if not vaccinated.

My neighbor took one other cat (Puff) in to be sterilized, she was still nursing some kittens, but they did the surgery, and now he is caring for the mother and kittens. The mother comes and goes while the kittens are living in a cage in his garage. The mother was not deemed to be adoptable, so when her kittens are old enough, they will be surrendered to the Humane Society, and the spayed female will go back to prowling our streets and stopping in daily for food, hopefully for many years to come. We are praying that the kittens are not infected with FeLV, but these kittens, the mother and the two cats that were put to sleep because of the FeLV were all very close.

I have a group of cats living in my back yard, over winter, they lived in my garage, but now they have a strip of tall grass and rose bushes in my fenced in secluded back yard. I have two adult females (Tiny Momma, yes, Little Momma’s daughter, and Yuli, who is Little Mamma’s sister) and three kittens back there now, and I have been able to gain their trust. I can’t touch the adults, but I can and do handle the kittens, this will help them be more adoptable since they will be more socialized with humans. One of them had an eye infection, but we successfully treated it with antibiotics given to us by the Humane Society. “My” kittens are growing fast, and it won’t be long before they hit the magic 2 months & 2 pounds that are needed to be surrendered to the Humane Society for adoption. That’s going to be a hard day, but we know it is the right thing for them, life on the street for a feral cat in a big city is not an easy thing. On the day we take the kittens in, ideally we would like to take both adult females in to be medically treated and spayed. We are hoping that since “my” colony and “my neighbors” colony do not mix often (the street between us is clearly their territorial boundary), that they will be free from the FeLV… Like I said, we get attached, and even though we know it is best, it is still hard to lose even a feral animal that has come to trust and count on us.

There is another cat that my neighbor has been caring for, for the past few moths, he has clearly been in pain, he has some sort of degenerative hip problem, maybe hip dysphasia, or possible from being hit by a car. We caught him once before and clipped some hair balls off and discovered he was a male, but since he knows his name (Pretty, and he really is, with the softest fur you can believe), he kept it. He has been in more and more pain and having trouble even getting up a curb or step to get his food. One night, he didn’t make his normal appearance, so we started wondering if we waited to long to catch him, but he showed up last night, we were able to ninja up on him and get him into a cage. The poor thing can’t even stand to use the bathroom, he just lays in it as he “does his business.” Unfortunately, my neighbor will have the unpleasant task of taking him to the HS on Monday morning.

We are going to keep plucking away, hopefully we can rid the area of the feline leukemia and get the stable healthy population (with no new kittens) that we are sacrificing for now. But losing two of the first three cats was quite a blow or our morale.

To end this on a high note, here is a little video that I took of the cats that have made my backyard their home. it is a lot of fun watching those kittens rolling around!