Getting up to speed...

Well, this is a little late in starting, because we wanted to get the OK from the SPCA first... now that we have it, here we go!

Back at the start of December 2010, we offered to foster cats for the SPCA, especially pregnant cats, who for obvious reasons soon take up a lot more space than, say, a single cat, once they drop their kittens. It's our way of supporting their great effort, without having to find money out of a tight budget.

So, our first foster cats... a mumma cat with four little kittens, each hardly bigger than the palm of my hand when we got them. Their eyes had only just started to open and all they did was sleep and feed. Mumma cat wasn't at all sure about us, and understandably so... she had been at the shelter for only a single day after being collected from the home of someone who suffered from Alzheimer's - not the best environment to raise a young family.

Mumma cat is a beautiful tortoise shell, though she was skinny and nervous. Her four babies were an almost-entirely ginger boy, a ginger-&-white boy, a black and white boy and a lovely little tortoise shell girl. It wasn't long until they would start to develop their personalities.

Now, because we had to keep them quarantined, and we are blessed with having an easily-isolated wash house and bathroom attached to the house, it was a simple matter to keep them separated from the house, our own cats, and the outside world. The only problem was ventilation. Without offering them a way to escape, it was going to be difficult indeed to prevent the cats from making a horrible stink. The solution was granted by some MacGyvering - the application of some shelf brackets to the side window frames allowed us to force the windows to be locked open JUST enough to provide airflow, but not enough to allow the adult cat to escape.

Alas, it seems her past came back to haunt her, and her kids... because Mumma cat had Feline Herpes which flared up again due to her high stress levels and low body tone. This was rapidly passed on to her little ones, either through contact or through her milk. Either way, just after Christmas we had to take them all to the lovely folks at the Hamilton South CareVets because the poor wee mites would wake up with their eyes glued shut with -yuk- which the vet explained was caused NOT by the Herpes virus itself, but more the secondary bacterial infection that was able to get a foothold while the immune systems were fighting the virus.

A drop in each eye,
Three times a day.
All going well,
The goop goes away...

Not quite, as it turns out... because though Mumma cat managed to fight it off fairly well, her babies didn't have much of an immune system and thus were not faring so well. By the time the drops were nearly gone, we were due to take them all back to the SPCA for worming and a quick check-up, however due to the SPCA's cat expert's concern it may be Cat Flu, and not wanting to bring that kind of thing into the main compound, we were asked to take them back to the vet for their worming and check-up. The usual vet wasn't available, due to the holiday period, so we had to take them to the Chartwell CareVets. The lovely vet there was able to not only give us more eye drops, but also suggested Baytrel to act as a 'big hammer' for the bacterial infection. That was January 5th.

And now, here we are at Jan 10th (well, now Jan 11th) and that's the foundation of the story. Over the next few days we'll start to fill in some of the more memorable moments and experiences of fostering cats for the SPCA here in Hamilton.

It's not easy... and there are days when you wonder why you opened your stupid yap to offer... but then there are those moments that make it all worthwhile.

It's a lot like having kids really...