Feral Fixers processed 24 more cats today at the PAWS-Chicago Spay/Neuter clinic. I picked up the cats from Tammy's this morning and brought them to PAWS and then picked them up from PAWS in he late afternoon and brought them back to Tammy's for recovery.

As always, we could not have brought in such a large load without the use of super-volunteer Sue's van - Thanks Sue!

16 of these cats were 'friendly ferals' while 8 were ferals. Of the 16 friendlies, 15 were from a hoarding situation. Normally, Feral Fixers is not a "Hoarding Rescue" organization, but when you run across such a situation, what can you do but help? The situation is bad for the cats and bad for the Hoarder. And, when some/all of the cats get outside (as they inevitably will), then it DOES become a feral cat problem. Better to nip it in the bud than to let it fester.

These were typical hoarding cats - not well socialized. Only one of them seems to be out and out nasty (and then, only at times), but the others are just scared and, in the words of the PAWS vet who checked them in today, "beaten down". It was so sad to see kittens (who we were told were 10 weeks old) cringe in the middle of the exam table, tail tucked between their legs and just shaking with fear. And, to top it off, these cats were the size of 10 week old cats, but, according to the PAWS vet, were at least 4-5 months old based on their adult teeth and other signs. In other words, these cats were badly malnourished.

So Feral Fixers has stepped in and is cleaning up the situation. Super-volunteers Julie and Connie are now fostering several of the kittens and Tammy will be placing the others at fosters in the next few days. Thanks Julie! Thanks Connie!

The final bit of bad news out of this situation is that the Hoarder has zero money - so Feral Fixers is footing the entire bill - probably going to run $1,000-$1,250 or more when all is said and done. And, thanks again to PAWS for providing extensive TNR services for an extraordinarily low fee - otherwise fixing this mess would be beyond our resources to handle. Mega-thanks to Tammy and the other volunteers who are cleaning up this mess.

With these 24 cats, Feral Fixers has now fixed 27 cats for this month, 246 for the year and 2,727 overall.