Sorry I left you hanging....

There has been lots of kitten drama these past few days. Sick kitten #1 turned out to be constipated. I probably caused some of that with the pedialyte. Once that was cleared out (primarily via butt-soaks, gently keeping him moving, and some very gentle body massage), his appetite returned. Then the healthy kitten started in with these spasms in her midsection...something I had never seen before. They grew worse and I was beginning to wonder if I might lose her. I searched and searched on the internet, and finally found one statement that kittens who were too cold could suffer neurological issues that could cause muscle spasms. The kittens were on a fuzzy towel on a heating pad, but they were in the open air of the bathroom during the day, so I moved them into a small box with a cover (and a thermometer inside, to make sure I didn't bake them), and by morning, I had a happy, hungry, spasm-free kitten. Which just goes to show, you can have bottle-raised a hundred kittens, and still do something stupid. They are now in a clear plastic bin, with a towel over the top, on the heating pad.

Anyway, they are filling out. They still have that pinched look of a starved kitten about them, but they are strong and eating well.

Fern, their mom, has gone into heat in the cat facility. At least she's a "phiiiirrrrp!" cat, and not a howler!

1:30 am . Very sick kitten.

5:30 am update: The kitten is feeling well enough to climb out of his box and be trundling around the bathroom when I came in. He had some more water, then some KMR, although he still doesn't want to suck the bottle again. Water and amoxicillin can be a wonderful thing. I'll pick up some pedialyte to make their KMR up with for a few days and I will bring in the scale and weigh them, then do some real math on what their amoxi dosage should be until I can reach the veterinarian Monday. He's currently on the floor in the bathroom rolling around with his sister. I'll feed then again in an hour and box them back up. Let's hope he's on the mend.

1:30 am The fuzzy kitten is the same or worse. He blew some more green snot out his nose while I attempted to feed him, and I now worry that perhaps his lungs are infected and he has pneumonia. I switched to water from KMR and separated him from his buddy, because she kept wanting to suck on his fur. I'm not sure what I'll find in the morning. He seems to have some strength, so I'll get up in a few hours to get more fluids into him, and pick up some more pedialyte in the morning if he's still with us.

Then I had to wash well and change my clothing before crawling back in bed because my senior cats insist on sleeping right up against me.

Poor kitten...

Fern's kittens

I finally took a photo of the kittens:

Their eyes were closed when they arrived, however they were big enough that they should have been opened, so I gently soaked them open. Pus. Yick. Lots of it. I cannot begin to tell you how disgusting it is to finally crack open an eyelid and have pus start rolling out. They've been getting eye ointment. The first day was pretty nasty. They would keep sealing closed and every time I soaked them open, there was more pus. Within 24 hours they had pretty much cleared up. You can see there are still issues, but they look so much better.

They were both eating very well, but one kitten has a stuffed up nose that doesn't seem to be getting better. He started to get a tiny bit snotty and couldn't breathe while sucking on the bottle, so I've started them both on a teeny bit of antibiotic (because of course, it's Saturday, and the veterinarians are all closed) in their milk, and the stuffed up kitten just chews the KMR milk out of the nipple with his mouth open. I expect there will be quite a bit of improvement by the end of tomorrow and he'll be back to sucking normally

I did take them into Fern. However she only wanted to nurse them, not wash them, so I took them back again. She has no milk to feed them. She also kept rolling over on them in her enthusiasm to cuddle.

I was in the closet and found a clean Hammermill Paper box, which made me laugh. I have no idea where it came from. They are almost too big for it, but they'll stay it in tonight.

Typical: It's more fun to sleep where I can drive you batty with how uncomfortable I look...

Please note the nice chair all padded up as comfortable cat-sleeping space.

Orzo checks in...

...and look at his gorgeous lady friend!

Orzo is brother to Beans. We received a call from Orzo's dad because he has found a feral cat family in Cortland that needs help.

Wings is running...er...snoozing...with the big dogs

...at his new home

Elsa (blind), playing

She is such a pretty cat.

Cats who say "thanks"

This is a very dark video, but I'm adding in just for the glimpse at the end of a very relieved cat who is clearly glad to be warm and dry and fed for the first time in her very short life.

It's the season for kitten dumping

The night before last, my neighbors Craig and Valarie called, with the sound of kittens mewing in the background. Someone had dumped a cat--little more than a kitten herself--and two tiny kittens.

Craig came down and picked up a trap the next morning, and they had the mother cat captured the next day. The kittens are in pretty rough shape---skinny, with infected eyes and runny noses, but with plenty of energy left. Poor little Fern, the mom cat, was initially terrified but was quickly won over by food once she was here in a cage.

After she had her second meal of the day, she rolled around and around in her bed---probably happy to not be hungry for the first time since she stopped nursing on her own mother. She's absolutely emaciated. She has enlarged nipples, so she definitely is the mom, but there is no milk to speak of for the kittens, so I have been feeding them pedialyte and KMR.

Pictures of the kittens soon!

Today is Discover Your Impact Day at Discovery Communication (my Mothership), and bless my boss for assigning us the task of helping shelters and rescue groups promote their pets, which means one of the things I'll be doing today is getting all new photos of The Owl House adoptables.

It's a beautiful sunny day, so hopefully that will help me some good shots!

Too bad they all look so grumpy. They just want to nap!

Garbage: The Continuing Saga

The above photo will probably only mean something to Donna and Tim, and maybe Valarie and Craig, who drive by frequently.

I have a few very unpleasant tasks that I've been putting off for awhile. I've discovered the best way to make myself accomplish these is to put myself in a position where I have no choice.

After the flood of fall 2011, I got a dumpster to deal with my lack of a trash transfer station. Previously, I had used three large black professional garbage "cans" which were parked right by the road in front of my barn. They were OK looking as far as garbage goes. On the outside, that is.

Despite being by the road, raccoons would visit them, and the smartest and strongest learned to get the tops off. Or the wind would blow the tops off, and the raccoons would visit. They found nothing worth eating, but would rip open the bags. Litter would spill into the bottom of the can, and of course the bag could not be lifted, because it would tear.

You can guess what I did about it. Nothing.

So over the course of time, two of the cans had the bottom third filled with ripped trash bags of old cat litter. As far as nasty trash goes, you would be surprised to learn that old cat litter isn't so bad....as long as it stays dry, which this did.

However, tipping these huge cans, removing the lovely waste, and rebagging it, was not high on my list of fun things to do. So there they sat.

Well, a friend of mine is getting married, and is having an outdoor wedding, and they needed garbage cans. Here were these very professional looking cans. So what did I do? I offered them up for use at the wedding.

This meant last weekend I rolled up my sleeves, broke out the leather gloves, and went to work. A few old sheets to dump the cans out on, and a couple of primal yells in order to muster strength enough to tip the cans on end, and a lot of sweat (it was hot last weekend) was all it took.

And a weedeater to clean up the area afterward. And a lot of soap and water and disinfectant for the cans. As well as a few days of sun to bake the cans.

The front of the barn looks much better without the line of trash cans. And that's one more nasty task out of my life. From now on, the trash company deals with my cat trash.

No one talks about how to throw stuff out when you think about getting involved in animal rescue. But it's a big issue.

Kitties in-house

The Owego/Lisle farm is getting finished up, and we are working on the house cats, now. "Little Bit" is one of those cats who is a tiny ginger streak to strangers. She only loves the man of the house, and spends her time on his lap in his wheelchair. However in the cage at my place, she gets over her hissy fit pretty quick and turns into a tiny lovebug. She's squinting at the flash in this shot.

The veterinarian reported she had pyometra(infection of the uterus) when I picked her up after her spay, so Little Bit is on antibiotics for 10 days. She's a lucky kitty. If she had been left as she was, she could well have fallen very ill and died.

Then this scared little girl (?) showed up at Donna and Tim's barn (who adopted Wings). Of course...if you adopt a cat, it's certain a stray will show up on your porch. Donna trapped her and we caged her up, hoping she would show signs of being tamed, but it appears she is feral. She also has a skin condition. Ringworm? Lice? I can't get close enough to tell. I'm going to pick up some Frontline for her today in case it is lice (Revolution, which I normally use because it kills roundworms and earmites in addition to fleas, doesn't necessarily kill lice, I understand). It is ringworm, it will resolve on its own in a few months, and it's not like I can give her lime sulfer baths.

Little Bit goes home today, and I think I'll talk to Donna about moving this cage back to her barn. It might make sense to have her back at the barn she's going to live in, during the two weeks we are waiting for her spay appointment. Otherwise she'll be sitting her two weeks, then another week recovering from her spay, then two more weeks being reintroduced to her barn home.

Baby bears!

Molly was just barking on the porch. At a woodchuck, I assumed, at this hour. I took a deep breath so I would not yell at her (because I do want her to bark at bears) and went outside with a treat. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something big and black, and realized the bear was only thirty feet away in the side yard. I grabbed Molly and ran in the house for my camera, but ended up with the flipvideo camera.

I tried to get some video through the great room window when I saw the first cub come down the tree, so like a typical fool I sprinted for the door and managed to get a little video of mom bear in the grass by the middle three, just a paw on Cub Two, and Cub Three climbing down.

So here you go, so everyone knows I'm not making up my bear tales...

Yes, 2:30 in the afternoon. Bummer.

Wings in his new home!

I take full responsibility for making him into a lard ball. Hopefully all the activity in Donna and Tim's house (three dogs! four dogs? I forget) will slim him down in short order!

Time for an updated banner

I don't know about you, but I was getting tired of looking at snow on my blog banner. However I don't have any good photos of cats outdoors. I decided to use Bear as a prop (although he is decidedly not feral). Bear is not a particularly genteel cat. Most of the photos I took ended up looking something like this:

However, via the wonders of Irfanview and Picasa, I could crop one of the better ones.

Some very good news: Wings has been adopted! Donna and Tim of Totalily Water Gardens are going to try him out. They have some very big dogs so Wings is going on a trial to see how he does. They also adopted Espie from us, as well as Gunsmoke (who was a senior cat and has walked over the bridge). They have a room to start him in, with a screen door, so he has the very best chance of fitting in.

I'll take a good photo of him tomorrow. I was going to take him to his new home tonight, but the bear (the actual bear) showed up around 8:30 pm, and even though he ran off when I yelled, I called Donna to reschedule for tomorrow morning.

It's a beautiful day--a day to get things done. First things first--breakfast on the porch. Poor Molly lost her bed to Ivan. This is one of the drawbacks of allowing the cats on the porch.

My friend Nancy is marrying soon, and the event is being held in a beautiful barn owned by a friend of hers. As we sat inside one rainy day, all talking up the upcoming day, I looked around and thought "I have a beautiful barn, too, and I've let it go to hell." That's not precisely true, as I have discarded a lot of junk that was down there. Now it's time to spiff it up so I can enjoy that beautiful space.

Here it is all junked up. Perhaps at the end of the day you'll see a nicer photo.

At this time of year, I'm sharing my barn with birds as well as the cats upstairs. I'm going to have to take breaks in my clean-up so the mother flycatcher, caretaker of this nest, can feed her babies. Unlike the starlings, she was too shy to approach while I was inside the barn breaking down cardboard boxes.

On an note unrelated to clean-up (but more pertinent to this blog),Coyote had a chance to get into the adoption program of another shelter back before kittens started pouring in everyone's doors, but when I checked her records, her rabies vaccination had expired. Of course, when I took her in to the vet for a exam, she had tooth issues. After the dental we learned her teeth were actually fine. Her gums were the issue. Coyote has stomatitis, which causes inflamed gums. The veterinarian cleaned her teeth and sent her home with antibiotics. Whomever adopts her will need to keep her teeth clean.

She was a good girl on her trip. Doesn't she have the most beautiful eyes?

On a recent trip into Owego to meet friend and adopter Gretchen, I noted these flyers in a storefront from Owego's local cat rescuers. It would be nice to meet them. Perhaps if I get the barn cleaned up, I could have a picnic like we've had previous years, where cat folk can relax and not feel odd for discussing cats.

We'll see.

The owl and the pussycat

This is making the rounds of Facebook (along with the earlier version from 2011) but I thought I would post it for my family, who rebel against Facebook.

This is what we narrowly escaped in NYS...

Biscuit went out, and never came home.

Biscuit went out one day about two weeks ago, was trapped and taken to the Bowling Green/Warren County Humane Society, was scanned for a chip, then was immediately killed.

While the shelter has a 5 day hold policy for dogs, there is no such protection for cats. As people familiar with the behavior of cats know, many trapped cats will display the fear and apparent aggression that shelters associate with feral or anti-social behavior, which puts any unidentified cat at risk when shelters are crowded and do not have a hold policy. Emily feels that if the staff had bothered to remove him from the trap and see that he was neutered and well fed and groomed, they’d have known Biscuit was someone’s pet, and at that point sould not have been so quick to kill him.

Word spread locally about Biscuit’s killing and caused outraged animal lovers to turn their anger toward the shelter. While understandable, that anger, if unabated, will make it even harder for the humane society to raise money and do what they can to rehome animals and deal with their area’s pet overpopulation problem.

Whether or not Biscuit should or should not have been allowed to roam outdoors, the fact remains that he was a friendly pet cat, not a feral. Even indoor cats get lost---frequently. And in fact, what if he had been feral, but had been neutered, vaccinated, tested, and fed daily by someone who had invested personal time and dollars in stopping the reproduction of cats in their little corner of their neighborhood?

What other property can you lose and have authorities immediately destroy? Let's suppose your drop your wallet, and your local police immediately toss it in the shredder as soon as a good Samaritan turns it in. Leave a ring of sentimental value on a the edge of a mall sink, and security can take it to the mall jeweler and cash it in for a few bucks of scrap gold. Your old beater car dies at the side of the road, and instead of being towed and impounded for you to pick up for a fine, it is immediately shipped off to be crushed for metal scrap.

If your indoor or outdoor cats are not collared, they should be microchipped. Outdoor cats should be gently trained to wear a break-away collar. And local shelters should remain our haven for lost pets, with a holding period of at least 3-5 days, so people who care about their pets can retrieve them.

I have been to the shelter in Biscuit's story. It is a large, active shelter that saves many lives, with good people who are dedicated to the lives of animals. Yet it appears if a cat comes in in a trap, and there are no immediate tags of ownership, he or she can be killed immediately. It would be easy to demonize the shelter, but in fact the sheer number of cats coming into shelters can be overwhelming, and the facilities to house them humanely for possible redemption (which seldom comes) are limited. It's easy to feel that it's far more humane to put scared feral cats down immediately than box them up for 5 days waiting for an owner who doesn't exist.

Yet the Biscuits of their world, and their owners, deserve to not be caught up in this net of "mercy."

We have more to do.

Maestro photos snitched from Facebook

More grown-up shots of Maestro.

Food fears

I realize this is not cat related, however I have more readers here than on Feral By Nature and this is important. It was also something I was unware of.

Do you know that when you go out for a Sunday buffet, and decide to splurge on that filet mignon special, what you are eating could just be cheap meat glued together...with a glue that is NOT a food.

Check this out. I know I'll never be tempted into eating steak again. I was just talking to a friend a few weeks ago about how I had given in to my memory of a really good steak, and ordered one while traveling for work, with the "justification" that I could take part back to my hotel room for Molly-the-dog. I had about two bites and put it aside, because it just didn't taste all that good. I told my friend that I likely would never order steak again. I figured I'd lost my taste for it, which was, I thought, a good thing. Now I wonder if what I had been eating at the hotel restaurant wasn't even steak. And who did eat it? My poor little mutt back in the hotel room.

And did you know those "natural" Kashi-brand cereals and other products aren't so natural?

“You might be wondering where your favorite Kashi cereals have gone. It has recently come to our attention that 100% of the soy used in Kashi products is Genetically Modified, and that when the USDA tested the grains used there were found to be pesticides that are known carcinogens and hormone disruptors.”

That’s the sign posted in the cereal aisle of a Portsmouth, Rhode Island grocery store called the Green Grocer. It’s been hanging there for a few months, but earlier this week, someone snapped a photo and posted it to online—and then it went viral.

Let’s back up for a minute. John Wood, who owns the store, actually removed the Kashi products from his store back in February, after reading a 2011 report from a group called the Cornucopia Institute, an advocacy group that supports organic farmers. The report states that only four of Kashi’s 24 cereal products are actually certified organic and that Kellogg, the umbrella company that owns Kashi, “purchases genetically engineered ingredients for its ‘natural’ Kashi products,” including chemically processed soy.

When Wood got wind of this, he pulled most of the Kashi products from his shelves and posted the sign. Photos of the sign were posted online this week—and now people are pissed. (ed: at Kashi/Kelloggs)

Here is Kashi's response.

And then there is the wonder store Whole Foods. Someone finally looked at their labels and noted that some of their packaged organic vegetables come from China. With China's poor track record of food oversight...really? Organic vegetables from China in one of the supposed highest tier food stores in the United States? What's up with that?

Here is the response from Whole Foods.

Now I realize trusting the media is a lot like trusting food marketers. Just as food marketers are trying to sell food and make a profit, the media sells stories.

Nonetheless...

Looking in my cupboard, I wonder how many foods I buy that I think are healthy, and that I might in fact be paying more for, specifically to eat better, that are in fact poisoning me (us).

I have been struggling over what to feed my cats so I'm not killing them with melamine and low-grade pesticide-aided corn and other grains. (I don't even want to think about the so-called meat in there, and the animal suffering involved in obtaining it). Now it appears that I need to have the same fears about what I eat...not just when I knowingly purchase junk food, but even when I try to purchase food that is supposed to be "good for me."