A scrubbing Sunday, and my disillusionment with the hard turn in national cat rescue messaging

It's pre-noon on a Sunday, with six feral teenagers returned to their colony, and two more going to a relocation cage in their new barn home later today. These four are ready for adoption (they were born here to a feral cat waiting for TNR) but the house needs a thorough cleaning before welcoming visitors.

While none of these first "back to blogging" posts will be particularly earth-shattering, it suddenly occurred to me that I print my blogs off as books as journals for my future self. Since I haven't been blogged, I have no record, really, of my last few years. 

This year is going to be a biggee for change, so I do want to save my progress. 

I need to sit down and flip through them -- I haven't in quite awhile. I've found my enthusiasm for cat rescue waning as I get older. I find I'm just going through the motions catching and getting cats fixed, and no longer really feel that spark of joy I used to. 

My emotions have experienced an even more precipitous drop in the last year, primarily due to my disillusionment with the new national animal welfare message. It has veered hugely away from making shelters better places for cats, and providing grants for spay/neuter, and has turned almost exclusively toward grants and programs touted as "community sheltering." Community support for pet owners started out as a wonderful program (like the groundbreaking HSUS Pets for Life program) that actively supported diverse communities. This admirable, forward-thinking and dare I saw successful sentiment of pet care appears to have been seized and subverted on by a few charismatic veterinarians and animal welfare administrators as a way to push the responsibility of animal rescue -- particularly cats -- into the laps of the community, and eliminate the sheltering of cats almost entirely. 

I'm not saying that existing excellent community support programs have been subverted. I'm suggesting that the sentiment of community support and involvement has been seized on by a group of advocates as a way to appear to jump on the community assistance bandwagon -- while instead actually foisting more work, cost, and heartache on them.

I've had to delete countless following paragraphs, because I need to address these issues one by one -- not in one long rant. And let me make it clear, this IS a rant. I have over-simplified the issue greatly, and there are good aspects of the community sheltering movement. 

BUT, I no longer feel like the handful of cats I help each year is part of a steady trudge toward a bright day when cats skittering across a village street are nearly as rare a sight as a stray dog rummaging in garbage bags in trash day. We were really getting there  -- we really, really were -- but I've seen a huge reversal.

So if I've only got a few decades left, I think I need to take some unique action that could actually make a difference, and leave the kitten socialization to a younger set of rescuers. I won't be stopping anytime soon -- after all, I expected to downsize TNR this summer, and THAT didn't happen -- but I expect to hit the road within the next two years. 

 

A summer hijacked by cats

This was supposed to be the summer I worked on the house and got it ready for sale. It ended up being a a flurry of TNR starting in August, plus a bucket of kittens. I finally made a contact -- and a friend or two -- at a barn I've been wanting to address, and once I had a a paw in that door, I didn't want to  put it off. 

Then a bunch of kittens were born on Debra's street in Waverly, and mom cat was due to pop out a second litter and refused to be caught. Litter #1 was too feral and too teenaged for socialization, so I had to warehouse them until the second litter and mom could be caught. For 81 days 10 teenaged ferals hissed at me from their big (thankfully) double level Ferret Nation cages. Then a couple who are close friends had a feral show up on their porch, who needed an extra long stay when his tail needed to be amputated due to an old wound. And I drove by a house in the village of Spencer where cats were basked in flowerpots on her front porch. Her veterinarian had told her (???!!!) that they likely had feline leukemia because the probably mother cat tested positive and that they wouldn't survive being fixed. She was lovely, but she took a little convincing when I knocked on her door uninvited. We got her batch fixed and they all survived nicely. I doubt a single one has leukemia -- they all seemed quite healthy as they glared at me from their traps and recovery cages. 

At any rate, my summer fixing the house was a bust, and the peeling paint is still peeling, the cellar stairs still need fixing, the back barn roof is still collapsed, but at least there are a lot less feral kittens in the world.  Luckily a lot of the spay/neuter was free or low-cost, and with some donations from landowners, an unexpected donation from a local credit union, and a birthday fundraiser on Facebook, at least the cost didn't come entirely out of my paycheck.

The light of my life has been my new heart cat Wiki. I've been training him to travel, so that we can move on to the next phase of our lives in a few years. I have only three pet cats now, and little Coraline will soon be leaving to live with close friends of mine, and then I'll have only two. I'm about to embark on a big adoption push for the adoptables I have here -- about eight adults and six cute kittens.  It would be nice to just have one cat room open for the winter, so I wasn't pouring money into electricity over the winter. I think things are going to be hard for everyone this winter.

So that's the update, before I dive into detailed topics. I haven't been good about staying in touch with the wider friends of Wildrun. I'll do a better. job.