The seemingly endless building work is within a cat’s whisker of completion. I’d sort of envisaged a completion date, a pause and then beginning to think about admitting cats again. Of course it didn’t work quite like that. Three weeks ago we got a message asking if we could take one small kitten in, and Basil became our first admission since the start of the building work.
He was clearly a character from the start. Very sweet, very loving, very keen to be friends with the other cats. The other cats were nowhere near so keen to reciprocate. Jenson, being a very kind boy went to play with him and played carefully, allowing for the fact he was smaller, whereas Rufus rolled him around the floor like a rat he’d just caught. After a bit of a family argument in which Honey complained bitterly about being expected to care for all the kittens every time just because she’s the only one who has actually had kittens …. Henderson grudgingly stepped in.
We mentioned the chance arrival of Albie in our last blog. His entrance was as different from Basil’s as it could possibly be.
Terrified and wanting nothing to do with nobody. Which made the vet run a few days later quite interesting. [As an aside, I’m reflecting on the way in which the passage of time renders/condenses the event into this single adjective. The sleepless nights beforehand, planning, worrying, making a plan B and C …. and D. The tension of the day which coincided with Uncle Alan coming to install the webcam. The frantic wall of death /window of pee scene and his eventual capture. Congratulations go to Alan who has installed far more cameras than he could ever count … but never one quite like this.]
Very grateful to our vets for keeping Albie overnight to neuter in the morning rather than our having to face trying to catch him again for another vet trip. Not neutered, not chipped, coat full of matts, and enough passengers on board to start a small zoo. We hoped he’d settle a bit when he came home from the vets but he’s determinedly hiding in his cat tree when there’s any sound of people around. We only know he comes out thanks to Uncle Alan and his brilliant webcam. Within the house we can watch a live stream of what’s happening in his room. Everyone else can see a still shot taken every few minutes on our website here: http://www.8livescatrescue.org/content.php?page=cam
We stepped up another gear again when Caramel and her kittens arrived. Again not really ready to start taking more cats in but when a rescue friend pinged me and asked if we could somehow squeeze them in ….. well …..
Lovely little family but they’d been living outside and not cared for. Caramel had ear mites and kittens had eye infections. Off to vets and back with eye drops, ear drops etc. Poor kittens it feels like every time I see them I’m inflicting some medication on them. First the frontline spray, then 3 days of panacur paste to worm them, then 6 days of twice a day eye drops and its almost time to start worming them again.
They’re certainly looking better for it though.
8 Lives: Sheffield 8 Cat Rescue 