TNR, Part II

Okay, first off, scroll down to read yesterday's post and get caught up.

So.  I left the trapping site on Friday night a little (okay, a LOT) discouraged.  There were just ... so MANY cats. What possible difference could our little rescue make?  The clinic we use has neutered over twenty-four THOUSAND animals in the past nine years, and yet the overpopulation problem persists.

But.  I kept reminding myself of the starfish story.  We can't save 'em all, but we can save some.  I got up early Saturday morning, sore from lugging the traps around the night before, and headed over to Susan's house; we had to be at the neuter clinic, forty-odd-miles away, by nine a.m.  She had ended up trapping two more cats the night before, for a total of six.  She kept them in the traps overnight, and while that may seem cruel, trying to move an angry feral cat into a crate or carrier is practically an impossibility without either the cat or the rescuer getting injured.  They were safe in the traps and would remain there for the trip to the clinic.  The man where we had trapped the night before called and said another cat had been caught in a trap that was left overnight, so I headed back over to pick up that cat.  Another volunteer had brought over a family cat that needed to be neutered, and I brought my six oldest foster kittens, who needed their first vaccinations.  The back of the truck looked like this:

Seven adult ferals.  One family cat.  Six kittens.  Two rescuers.  One truck.

Of  the ferals, there were four black cats, one gray, one siamese, and one tabby with a severe neck wound.  "I thought it was a red collar," Mr. dipsh*t IBM said.  When I saw that cat in the trap the night before, I asked Susan if she was going to release it, but bless her, she took a look at the wound and said, "Nope.  Maybe they can patch him up at the clinic."  I was afraid that he was a goner, but Susan was willing to give him a chance.

We headed for the clinic, making it there by 8:30, and started unloading.  The ferals had been amazingly quiet during the ride; evidently they had decided to just tough it out.  Even more amazingly, nobody had peed or pooped in their traps; Susan said that stress, instead of making them void, sometimes does the opposite.  The volunteers at the clinic used squeeze traps with the ferals so they could be knocked out for the surgery.  They were doing a total of thirty-one cats and five dogs that day.

With all the ferals (and the family cat) safely sleeping and awaiting their operations, it was time to vaccinate Beary's kittens.  One by one, they were weighed, vaccinated, flea-treated, and sexed.  Three girls, three boys!  All weighing between two and two-point-four pounds. 

We made it back home with the kittens around eleven in the morning.  We would have to be back at the clinic by seven that night to pick everybody else up.

To be continued ...