Another Round – Contest!

Hi everyone. It’s me again, Sprout. I wanted to tell you that it seems  I will leave this house uneaten after all. As a matter of fact, none of the other cats have been eaten – how curious? I figured I would put an update here because my captor has criminally neglected her blog this week. There is a good reason though, I swear. These tiny Kitten McNuggets arrived a few days ago and she has to bottle feed them all the time. I think if she eats anything it will be these tender morsels. The lady is also knitting a ton of Christmas presents. There had better be one for me in that pile. I’ve been trying to be nice to her. I let her pet me sometimes, and I come visit her in bed when she is lounging. I leave her yarn alone like a good girl.

I’ve asked Carrot to put a personal ad for me on the Internet. We’re going to look for a picture that makes me look unbearably cute, and then we’re going to describe me in a way that makes me seem like a catch. I’m no small thing anymore – I am about 4 or 5 months old. I like to get to know a place before I am comfortable running things. I take excellent care of my fur, and I am softer than your finest cashmere. I like other cats well enough, so hopefully I have a friend or two at my new place.

As for those babies -

There are four of these guys, 1 girl and 3 boys.

This little girl is Esme. Her name comes from a comment left on a previous post asking for kitten names.

This is the little black boy with soulful eyes and a quiet manner.

This is one of the tabby boys.

And here is the other tabby boy. His face is wider than his brother’s, which makes them easy to tell apart.

So, I was thinking – we should have another baby naming contest. This time, the lady will knit you a kitten-themed dishcloth and mail it to you if she picks your submission. You’ll have to be patient for it though because she has a lot of knitting to complete before Christmas and the prize will have to wait until maybe closer to the new year. The comments from this blog go to a gmail account. If you win, the lady can contact you and ask for your address, so be sure to put your email address in the appropriate box! Only the lady who writes this blog and I can see any personal info like that. We’ll announce the choices on Wednesday, so have your submission in the comments by the end of the day on Tuesday. You can submit a name for each kitten, or for just 1 or 2 of them. A dishcloth will be sent out for each name chosen, so if she picks 2 of your suggestions, you get 2 dishcloths. Good luck!

I’ll try to get her to post more between now and then as well. You’re welcome.

How does this work?

I’ll begin today with a question: Does anyone know how to get grants for a non-profit group? Please leave a comment if you do. I’ll follow up in email.

Here’s the thing – Toni’s Kitty Rescue (see my sidebar) was started by a volunteer who saw that San Francisco’s city shelter needed a foster program. Since Toni got started, her program has grown every year. As the group got bigger, she made it into an official non-profit group and was able to accept donations – all was fine and dandy. Now the group has grown so large that we need someone to do administrative duties about 20 hours a week. The woman who does it now has been volunteering (and she’s amazing, let me tell you), but she needs to make a living. Toni and the rest of us don’t want to lose her, so we’d like to pay her. The problem is that we don’t get enough in donations to do that – we would need to come up with $15,000 – $20,000 a year (maybe a little more). So, any help figuring out how to attain that goal would be greatly appreciated here. We’d like to continue saving these cute little guys in greater numbers!

The kittens I am fostering have been as darling as ever. Last night I had a lot of people in the kitten room – 5 to be exact. The undersocialized kittens did a great job – both of them purred at one point. The babies were loud and hungry. Wisteria was the center of attention as often as she could be.

One of my guests was holding Wisteria when she began to get bitey. I think she’s teething, so she kind of gnaws on whatever she gets her mouth on. When Wisteria bit my guest, he turned her over and folded her up so that she couldn’t get his fingers. Still biting, Wisteria got ahold of one of her own legs and bit pretty hard! She bit so hard, in fact, that she let out a yelp. I noticed this morning that her bites have gotten a lot gentler.

I haven’t gotten as much spinning done as I thought I would this week. It’s partly because I had several meetings to host and to attend, and partly because I don’t like the wheel I am currently using.

I think that the wheel itself works fine. I’ve learned 2 things from this wheel, though: 1) I don’t like the castle style because of the way you have to reach down to start the wheel, and 2) I don’t like the way that the treadle is best worked with the left foot. I treadled much better with my right foot, but I think that I am going to like the double treadle even better than a single right-footed one.

I need to top off the babies and get to bed (I just missed the midnight time line again!)

Spay/Neuter

While I was out blog-surfing, I began to notice a disturbing trend. I kept seeing blog entries about pregnant cats. I don’t mean “the strays in my neighborhood are at it again” sort of thing. I mean, “I am so proud/happy/thinking these kittens are all going to have a magical life” sort of posts. I can’t help but wonder, do these people know what they are doing?

I personally handle roughly 30-40 kittens a year through the foster program. I know that the shelters I volunteer for take in about 1600 kittens per year together. A lot of kittens actually grow up in the shelter. No one at the shelter is thrilled to see yet another box of kittens come in. Sure, they’re cute, but in most cities, they are unlikely to find homes. Most shelters have to euthanize a lot of animals every day for space. When I lived in Tallahassee, FL I saw an article in the newspaper about the euthanasia rates. They published a picture of a huge room full of dogs that were euthanized that day – not for health or behavior reasons. Just because no one wanted them fast enough. I assure you, no one at the shelter wanted to do that, they just had to.

Kittens given away without dealing with the shelter situation don’t often fare much better. There are people who collect “stray” animals and sell them to labs for animal testing. They often answer ads for free kittens. Sometimes people will take free kittens because they want to do terrible things to them. I remember a case in college where some teenaged boys put a kitten on a hot grill to see what it would do. Someone here in San Francisco lit a dog on fire and set it loose in a park. They just figure that the animal was free, so who cares?

I hear so many people make excuses about why they cannot or will not get their animals spayed or neutered.

1) They fear that the surgery will impair the cat in some way. Well, no. Animals have no sense of “missing” reproductive organs. The obesity that often occurs after the surgery is due to overfeeding and under-exercising the poor animals. To top it all off, there is just as much of a risk, maybe even more, of a pet dying in childbirth as there is of complications from surgery.

2) They say it is too expensive. I assure you, raising litter after litter of kittens is much more expensive than having the surgery once. There are a lot of volunteer and low-cost organizations that will do a cheap or even free spay/neuter surgery for pets.

3) They think their pet should have a litter before he/she is altered. Think this through. A cat can reproduce as early as 6 months of age. There is an article about this on about.com. A cat’s gestation period is about 63-64 days (roughly 9 weeks) and the average litter size is 4-6. If you do the math, it turns out that a cat can potentially be responisble for about 31 kittens in her first year of breeding, and by year five, she can be the common mother through great, great, great grandmother to a total of 255, 871 kittens. Most of them will not find a home.

I hear that Oprah had a great episode about the shelter situation and puppy mills. I have included the link here, both for myself and for others who might be interested in reading the article about the show: http://www.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200804/tows_past_20080404.jhtml. I’ll admit, I haven’t read it all yet, but still it’s worth looking at. 

There are benefits to having pets spayed or neutered.

1) Reduced future medical costs. Ovarian and testicular cancer cannot happen in altered animals, given they no longer have the requisite parts. Cancer is very expensive to treat.

2) Reduced chance of aggression, spraying, and other undesirable behaviors. Many aggressive behaviors in pets are directly linked to establishing territory and and mating. Cats spray their territory to mark it (and man does it stink!). Female cats get obnoxious and loud when they are in heat.

3) Reduction in pet overpopulation. As I said before, most shelters have to euthanize for space. That means perfectly well behaved, healthy animals will die just because there are too many of them.

One last thing to consider. Trap, Neuter, Release programs do work. San Francisco shelters have had such success educating the public and altering feral cats that shelters in San Francisco are able to import animals from shelters with high kill rates. There are still plenty of kittens and puppies to go around, but now there aren’t so many that they are just being put down. Isn’t this the more humane route?