Saturday, June 26, 2010

The 4th Kitten

The people over off Grand Prairie, who had a brown tabby female give birth to four kittens beneath their house, have caught the fourth kitten. I caught mom and the other three kittens at least ten days ago, I think it's been. Then left a trap set under their house two more days, but no fourth kitten. They had only seen four kittens once, so they presumed her dead. However, yesterday, they saw her again. So I took over a trap and they caught her this morning.

What will I do with yet another kitten? I don't know.

Heartland was going to take in the four from the the feral down town calico, but e-mailed yesterday to say they'd gotten in 15 cats yesterday alone, and so they couldn't do it, not til some later date. I understand. This is the season of death, unfortunately. Idiots letting their cats have kittens and by now the market is saturated.

Dead kittens aren't cute.

Two of the four orange kittens from the trailer park thrive, while the two smaller girls have diarrhea of unknown cause. I need to get one tested.

The biggest of the four is one of the girls!

Slurpy, the third kitten from the Lebanon rural colony, is still here and will soon be three pounds. If I don't get her spayed and into a home, she'll end up here forever.

I have decided to return the feral adult calico to her down town location. I can't take in another cat. Whether the neighbor will follow through on his threats to trap and kill the cats there, I don't know. I have run ads repeatedly trying to find some of those adult ferals an option to no avail. There is only so much I can do.

It is disheartening to have nowhere now to easily get cats fixed, at a moments notice. I am very depressed over the whole thing. There are two cats from the Maple street house, both females, needing fixed. They had agreed to wait on those two until the Albany grant kicks in the first. They are teen females from the feral mother fixed last week, along with the three kittens from her latest litter. There are two more orange females from the location where I took two orange females into be fixed from two days ago. One is about to have more kittens. The other didn't go because she had mastitis. She'd had kittens, they'd just given away in front of a store.

There are six more at least at the Lebanon trailer park who need to be fixed and two more at the rural Lebanon colony. I have another N. Albany situation waiting and one on Tennessee Road.

I have the rural trailer colony to finish. The fourth cat trapped there, another very young black tux, was very pregnant when she was spayed. After I returned her yesterday, I stopped by the neighbors place who had agreed to help trap up at the trailer. I told them to stop trapping because of the price increase due to the new rule. The man rolled his eyes and said "Where has commmon sense gone?" The woman, older herself, said "I had a ten pound baby without pain meds."

What to do, how to get all these cats fixed now. Now that the rule makers in Salem have created a new rule that has made the clinic I had been using up the price per cat by $20. What to do now. Maybe I should ask the rule makers to foot the bill or to start holding clinics to fix these throw away cats. How about it OR vet board, can you hold some low cost spay neuter clinics to help out?

There is scrambling going on amongst the outfits that try to help cats get fixed, over the pain med rule and subsequent increased charges by vets. Sad that rulemakers are in fact making it tougher for Oregon cats to get fixed. If rules are made, I feel, the consequences should also be addressed by those who make the rules, so there is less damage as a result, damage to the lives of cats, in this case.

The OR vet board made the rule to ease the pain in surgery of single cats, which is high minded on their part, I'm sure. But the consequences of their rule to the health and welfare of massive numbers of cats is indeed dire.

UPDATE: the fourth kitten is a boy, and already tame. Who tamed him? I am going to guess it is the neighbor man, who called me saying cats were living under his shed and he wanted them gone or else. Yeah, right, Mr. Tough guy. This kitten didn't tame by magic and your household is the only place it could have happened. Mr. Tough Guy, I luv ya!

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