As I’m writing this on August 31st, we’ve neutered yet another 30 cats today and a quick count of the results show that only 9 of them were males! By Spring those 21 females could have produced another hundred cats and so on, and so on…

We are asked repeatedly why we do what we do and can’t we take a break for awhile? The potential for the numbers to blow up quickly and to have to seemingly do it all over again is too great. We are in for the long haul, as evidenced by our achieving

Over 3,000 cats neutered!

and we are only approaching our fourth anniversary of Feral Fixers as an organization!

Much To Do

September and October are going to be hoppin’!

In September we will be at three different events and we have a Sweet Tomatoes fundraiser.

In October we will be hosting a breakfast for Celebrate 3000 on National Feral Cat Day, October 16th, followed very quickly by our second annual “Shop For Strays” Bazaar on October 23rd!

We hope to see a lot of our supporters at these events, it’s great to get caught up on what’s happening in the lives of the people and the cats we’ve helped!

Shelter Medicine

Our friends at PAWS recently hosted a symposium on shelter medicine that I was able to attend. Through grants from Maddie’s Fund and in conjunction with Purdue University Veterinary Medicine veterinary students doing research at PAWS, they establishing new and useful data for the care of shelter animals. While Feral Fixers does not have a shelter, we do care for many cats on a temporary basis that are ill and injured.

A very interesting study on FIV+ cats seems to indicate that in a household that has a mix of FIV+ and negative cats, the negatives are not acquiring the virus. As there is such a stigma associated with a positive FIV test, I will be watching this study and crossing my fingers – for four more years til the results are in! FIV+ cats have never been studied before so this is truly ground-breaking!

Additional research is being done on just what upper respiratory viruses and bacteria are present in shelter cats and which antibiotics tackle those causes the best. Very interesting!

Eventually

We may not be able to help everyone who contacts us right away, but we seem to get everywhere eventually!

We were contacted last week by a neighbor of someone we helped in ’08. They just weren’t able to get every cat and said there were several caretakers in the neighborhood. Well, we did another cat in ’09 and nothing more until this week. One of the neighbors has talked to everyone in the neighborhood and they are willing to resolve this now. Unfortunately, there are now 20 cats that come to just one of these houses, so we may be looking at a big project but it will not get any better without intervention!

The gentleman who called was surprised by my reaction when he told me his address, I was so glad as I knew the problem had most likely intensified in the last two years!

But we will make kittens a rarity, eventually!