It's always busy time!

So here, I've made time to blog.  I'm not even going to deride myself for not doing it sooner!  It's been really busy (as always), and that's ok.  There's always more cats to save.  There's always more that need help and rehabilitation. 

Look at this terrifying cat (Heart).  Grr.

Right now, we have a few of the longer-term babies still that are ready for homes but haven't found them yet for various reasons.   The lovely Heart is still with us, but she doesn't travel well at ALL, so it's difficult to get her into carriers to move her to events.  Hard for her to go home if she can't travel to events.  Hopefully, we can figure something out and find her a place to be.  She's a lovely, sweet, affectionate girl after everything she's been through.  She definitely deserves it!  Such a cute little chunky monkey! :)

I got an update from the woman who adopted Rameses as well.   She is SO thrilled with him.   She has a few other cats now, and not only does he get along with them, he also loves her boyfriend!  She says he's one of the nicest cats she's ever met, and I would tend to agree with her.  Of course, she sent me the text message while I was at work, and I'm sure my co-workers thought I was nuts or pmsing or something when I got teary-eye randomly at work.   How can I not be emotional about this guy?  He has the ULTIMATE outcome!  A wonderful forever home with a wonderful person who will NEVER let me know fear or sadness or hunger again.  THIS is why we do rescue!! 

We still have Meggie.  She's a little tortie who came to us from another rescue.  She was DEATHLY ill when she was a bottle feeding kitten, and despite the fact that she was being saved, she didn't know it, and the act of medicating her traumatized her to the point where she would bite or scratch anyone who came near her.  After lots of work and patience, we can now touch her, but we still can't touch her head.  SOON!  Hubby has said it's his mission to make her his buddy, and I think it's working!  He managed to touch her first.   I'm good with that.

We also have Humphrey.   Humphrey came to us as a cute little kitten... Or I should say, a small demonic vicious kitten who would rather eat you than look at you.  He's definitely been a challenge and taken longer than I ever would have imagined.   In fact, he's still not ready by any stretch of the imagination.  I've realized though he is RIDICULOUSLY intelligent, and I tend to find that the really

The Regal Humphrey aka "Humpy" LOL

smart ones don't let go of their reservations quickly.   Funny story about Humphrey though....

So he wasn't neutered.  He DEFINITELY needed it.  We'd started calling him "Humpy" because he was humping everything.  The problem was that balance between getting the neuter and not wanting to ruin any progress we'd made with him.  So, deciding to deal with whatever came, I managed to get him crated up and didn't die in the process, so it was off to Dr. J to get the deed done.  Now I warned EVERYONE at the vet office that Humphrey was NOT going to co-operate.  They couldn't just go in on him because he would either panic and run, or he would panic and bite, and neither one of those situations was something I wanted to happen.  Great!  Everyone's warned and all will go well.   Until... reality hits.   So the vet was pretty confident he could handle Humphrey.  Even though he was warned by myself AND the tech (who told him repeatedly "Treasure said DON'T go in on him go slow"), he decided to go on in and grab Humphrey for his exam. I bet you he'll never do that again, because Humphrey showed him EXACTLY what I was talking about.  He promptly dodged past him, trashed the back end of the clinic, then managed to somehow get the EXTREMELY heavy door to the front open, trashed the front of the clinic, and they were sure he would dodge out the front door too...  Thankfully they managed to get him scruffed just before that.   At which point Humphrey promptly peed ALL OVER the vet.   When I came to pick him up later, the story was relayed to me with much laughter, and I couldn't help but giggle.  To this day, the vet remembers Humphrey.  Bet he will never forget him, either!   Anyways, Humphrey has made immense amounts of progress now that he's finally neutered.  He still won't let me touch him by going in, but he lays on the bed with us, and will come up and "tap" us with his paw, wanting us to know that he's acknowledging us.  I'm in no rush.  I enjoy his pretty face and his antics, and he gets along great with the other cats.  He will come around when he's ready to.

Bailee has made some AMAZING progress as well.   It's very obvious to me the longer I work with him that he WAS badly abused, however, at some point he WAS a very sweet and loving boy who enjoyed the attention and affection of humans.  He has another little girl, Tux, in the room with him, and when she runs for attention, I can see in his eyes the conflict between wanting some of that too, and being paralyzed with fear. He doesn't poop when we come in the room anymore.  In fact, he doesn't even run.  He moves away and watches, intensely curious.  It's awesome because I know it means it won't be long before he comes around. 

Alfalfa

We had a bit of a surprise with one of our kittens.  We got him when he was really small.  He and his siblings were fully feral.   Terrified, and not afraid to bite if you scared them.   Well Alfalfa was the one who seemed to come along the quickest...  He was liking people and not running away anymore.   I booked an appointment to have him neutered, but he ended up with an eye infection.   I treated the infection, and booked him again.  The day before he was due for surgery, guess what... another eye infection.  Rinse repeat several more times, and I finally just asked the vet if it was ok to bring him in anyways. He said sure and that he would take a look at it.   During this time, his progress seemed to backslide.  He was getting sketchy and hissy and even struck out a few times.  I could NOT figure out what the heck we were doing wrong, but managed to get him crated up anyways with him hissing, then growling for the ENTIRE car ride to the vet.  He was a mean and nasty little booger the whole time there...  But the vet made a discovery that explained a lot.   Alfie's eye infection was more than that.  He was going blind.  The vet estimated that he had about 20% vision left and was probably only seeing shadows.   Well that certainly explained a LOT!!  No wonder he was backsliding... the signals he was getting would be TERRIFYING for a cat.  For anyone, for that mater.  Armed with that knowledge, we took a different track with Alfie, calling out to him long before we touched him, giving him a lot of verbal cues.  Moving more slowly to allow him to recognize shapes... And suddenly our sweet little boy was back, where he's been ever since!  If anything, he's become MORE sweet and affectionate.   Unfortunately, until he's fully blind and really adapted to that state, he can't really go anywhere.  It would confuse him a lot and would likely regress him.  it is going to be much easier to let him get used to his state and then find him a home.  That's ok, I rather enjoy the little fellow, as do we all, and we're all happy to support him until he's ready.

I'm more than a little pooped now, but I hope to do a new post with some updates on some new baby additions soon! 

As always, if you are interested in any of the cats and kittens I discuss in my blog, please contact NCWL. 

Keep calm and rescue on.