Huskie is a big (big!!) black and white guy, one of a feral duo who are fixtures in the garden. His very close friend is Clem Fandango, a large tabby. They are always together.

We’d been watching Huskie’s ears for a couple of years, as you do. Well, one in particular had started to develop some nasty dry-looking sores. I showed photos to a couple of vets who both said pretty much the same thing - ‘looks like squamous cell carcinoma. In a feral cat, that’s going to very hard to treat’. It turned out it wasn’t exactly the treatment (outer ear removal) that would be difficult, it was the recovery element which would mean wearing an e-collar for two weeks before returning to the vet to have stitches removed.

Obviously in a pet cat, no problem. In a feral, how on earth do you (a) manage it for two weeks and (b) then get the animal back into the special small cage used for anaesthetising it …? And what if it escaped with the collar on … it’s tied on with tape so that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Both vets expressed serious doubts about the whole process and thought it may be better to euthanase him when the ulcers got very bad.

When the worst ulcers started bleeding and we saw him rubbing his head against walls, it was time to take the plunge, albeit with some trepidation.

Here he is before the surgery.

Sooo, Step 1 trapping: the last time I had trapped Huskie he had been whisked off to the vet for neutering about 5 years ago. Having a good memory for such things, he wasn’t keen when he saw the trap coming out of the shed!

I kept it wired up for a couple of weeks so it wouldn’t spring, and I kept putting yummy things in it.  After a while, he was going right in. Once this was happening, I booked the surgery, and set the trap properly - the biggest challenge being stopping others thinking this was a brilliantly elaborate way of getting some serious treats!

The day of the surgery came and having trapped him the night before, and transferred him to the special anaesthetic cage, off we went to the clinic. Javier our lovely vet, had a quick look and said yes I can do it, the cancer is not too advanced.

Back home, we’d set up a large cage in the bathroom. And here is Huskie that evening. Easy to manage so far!!

The next day the hard work began.

Step 2: managing him in the cage

Now, Huskie is very feral (there are degrees of feral!). He will not let me touch him. If he accidentally allows me to brush past him, he bolts.

The thing about feral cats is that they really don’t want to be inside a building. When we’ve had one escape a trap inside, or get shut in for some reason, it’s a scary thing. They jump vertically looking for a gap. They see windows as holes that if they can get up to, they can escape out of. The last time it happened I was worried the cat would break his legs with the ferocious and desperate jumping. You just have to quickly open all the doors and hope the cat will run out before it’s hurts itself.

So managing a feral cat wearing an e-collar in a cage indoors means absolutely not allowing any possibility of escape from the cage - even into the house.

So how were we going to open the cage to put his water and food in?, we pondered. Lightbulb moment - Adam found some wooden slats in the garden and we found a way of holding Huskie in one part of the cage securely while we opened the door at the front. We would slide slats in from the top of the cage to the bottom and leaving them there while the door was open. This seemed to work well, and even better, the whole floor slid out of the cage to allow for cleaning.

We knew keeping the cage covered with a blanket, providing darkness, would help to keep Huskie feeling as relaxed and hidden as possible during his confinement.

​You can see the whole set up below, and the wounds early on in the healing process.

So for 15 days we fed him two or three times a day, cleaned the litter tray, and kept it all tidy using this method. He would watch very intently through the slats as he sensed freedom being just marginally closer when the door was open, but he didn’t try to barge his way out.

Another challenge was actually getting him to eat. The collar meant he found it very awkward and put food all over the place and little actually being eaten. We found various ways of propping bowls up so they were higher, and eventually found these special elevated and angled versions. Another challenge met!

Here he is eating (Huskie likes eating, a lot!).​

Step 3: decanting feral cat into anaesthetic cage

Finally, the challenge was how to get him out of the larger cage and into the much smaller wire cage to go to the vet.

The trick with transferring feral cats from one thing to another thing is to use (a) blankets and (b) their fear of you as a human being. The place you are wanting a feral to move to needs to promise darkness and safety, as you remove that very feeling from the original location. So we basically removed the slats, lifted the blanket and stood over the large cage to get him to move into what appeared to be a dark tunnel.

And it worked like a charm. Suddenly he was securely in the anaesthetic cage! Here are the three steps below.

​Major sigh of relief all round. We were on the home straight.

The vet was very pleased with the way the wounds had healed and removed the stitches and the collar under anaesthetic.

And then Huskie came home. The next day we let him out. It was brilliant to see him free again, and the two boys back together.

And just look at him now. He’s still very handsome, and cancer free.

Hopefully these tips will help any other feral cat carers to manage a tricky post-surgery period of confinement. With a bit of equipment, and some patience, it was manageable!!

Now, I'm just waiting for someone to ask me what on earth type of animal is that large black and white creature!!

The above is TP in her younger days, and below, the trapping process.

I think next time will be with Husky, who seems to have skin cancer on his ear. That will be interesting!
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​Wow, it’s been so long! I can’t believe it, where does the time go etc etc???

Just sneaking in under the rollerdoor as June disappears, so the right hand side of the website registers a slightly less scary gap in blogs than it would if I had left it until July (tomorrow). Obviously much has happened since the last blog in January, the ‘Before Times’, but very little has happened as well. Time seems to have done some strange things of late.

We are now, in rural Galicia, almost back to normal and there is hope – albeit with a fear of sprouts* - that we are now firmly in the ‘After Times’ of the pandemic. I think there is quite a way to go for this pandemic and I’m not complaining about being here. In fact, after years of procrastination or perhaps just sheer laziness, we have started a vegetable garden, and have been pulling out gorgeous lettuces daily.
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And what about the cats? Well, all is rather stable here in the village. Here’s a pic of Chubby Chops II in what our neighbours call his sentry box, and this photo sums things up. Nothing to see here! We have achieved our aim of having a stable colony of adult feral cats, and that’s rather wonderful. I think I saw the small figure of a tabby kitten the other day on the other side of the village, but for now I am not aware of an imminent population explosion.

There are of course other needy feral cats and other needy animals generally. Here’s a plug for a local animal sanctuary Miño Valley Animal Sanctuary http://minovalleyfarmsanctuary.org/en/ which makes our small feline endeavour look like – well, a small feline endeavour! They’re amazing people, caring for farm animals who would normally be slaughtered for some reason, be it old age and perceived uselessness or being born the ‘wrong’ sex. They have horses, and donkeys, sheep and goats, hedgehogs and chickens, and all sorts of animals. Even cats.
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Speaking of cats, we are increasingly concerned about a colony of feral cats who live on a busy road in the centre of Monforte de Lemos. We noticed them recently when we were having a drink and a tapas on a terrace, as a skinny, very pregnant female came and sat near our table asking for scraps. It turns out there are ‘many’ according to the barman, and they live on a vacant building site behind that bar. So, we’ve started feeding them. 

We entertained the idea of trapping them all and bringing them to the village but had to rethink that idea. As a friend said to me, their home may not be ideal, but it's their home. The village would not be their home. How would we keep them from trying to get back to town? How would we make sure they stayed together? We don’t have a handy place to lock in 10 or so feral cats for two weeks until they become accustomed to a new location. So, for now, we are feeding them in situ. 

​There are obviously others in town who feed the feral cats. A few blocks away we saw this recently which was a relief, but the colony above – near the ancient Colegio - seem perpetually thin and we see them darting in and out of parked cars on that busy road. 

​I’m thinking of starting a new project called “Los Amigos de los Gatos de la Calle” … but will need local help. I’ll update you next time.
 
*Finally, we all of course live in fear of further resurgences - or ‘rebrotes’ - of Covid 19. Use machine translations at your peril! 

It has been dawning on us lately that we have neutered everyone! We have a largely stable colony of mature cats – mostly males – who are all neutered. And we have helped our neighbours neuter their barn-full as well. Of course, there is the odd incursion, more on that below.
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Further afield in town the other day, I looked for Massy, the elderly ginger female who we helped some months ago, and was pleased to see her lying in the sun, seemingly quite content. I wanted to give her the flea treatment that I have in my glove box (doesn’t everyone drive around with spot-on in the glove box?) and gave her a cuddle and applied that. She seemed fine, purred loudly, and her fur is still soft. She still has the pink diamante collar we gave her, looking rather less pink.  Here she is:

Back in the village, we had been worried about Bandido who we hadn’t seen for a couple of months, but he turned up earlier this week so that was a relief. But we are still worried about Ronnie who arrived recently with what looks like gingivitis. This is sometimes a sign that one of the killer viruses has taken hold, so that is concerning. I gave him antibiotics for a couple of days and since then we haven’t seen him, so can only hope he is fine and eating elsewhere. There is nothing else we can do. Ronnie is very feral so if he gets very ill, I suspect he’ll keep away from us.

2CC is trying to join the musketeers but they are having none of it and there are skirmishes and howl-oriented face-offs between him and Husky quite often in the courtyard. I guess they are still figuring out the pecking order, but for now 2CC gets his meals in his own hut, away from the others.

In addition to the stable 8-12 feral cats we feed, there are a couple of unneutered males who drop in from time to time, and again it is Husky who takes on the role of “guardian of the Butterfly Cat Project” (he’s keenly aware of the relationship between supply of cat food and demand for cat food!) and tries to turf them out. We watched with amusement an altercation – one that did not come to blows or even physical contact - the other day in the finca where a horse is kept. Husky and this unknown white and tabby tom were within millimetres of each other’s faces, backs arched and tails fluffed up, ready for action.  

She (the Galician mountain horse – see picture below) was munching away seemingly oblivious to the drama a few meters from her, and I was thinking how good it would be if she broke up the flight. After all she’s quite large, presumably they’d run if she approached. As if she had read my mind, she sauntered over to them and put her nose right between them, with the desired effect. They scarpered. Thanks Loretta. The carrots are on their way!
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Speaking of the horse, she is a major curiosity to the London 4. They have never seen anything like her. Is she a large cat, a placid long-legged dog? What on earth is she, and how does she get by eating grass?

​I leave you with Feeder of the Month of December 2019 – my sister Anna. Anna and Jason have become the latest sponsors of the Butterfly Cat. Many thanks both! 

They were visiting from Australia where, dear reader as you will know,  there are catastrophic fires in the south east  which have been burning for months. A recent report from the EU https://www.eea.europa.eu/ predicts longer droughts and longer summers in Spain, and at the same time an increase in ‘heavy precipitation events’ in areas such as Galicia – which I think we saw a sign of in November/December. I guess the problem with too much rain at any one time is soil erosion and that you can’t capture it all. However, I think the dams are full ready for our own fire season.  I wish I could send some heavy precipitation over to south eastern Australia. 

Just a quick update this month. We have finally taken Ronnie (named after Ron from Harry Potter as he’s ginger) to the vet for neutering. I trapped him on Thursday night, and he had the op on Friday. I haven’t seen him since he raced off out of the cage on Saturday morning, but this is not unusual. He is very feral and the whole experience will have been frightening so I imagine he’ll give Fort Feral a wide berth for a while. We’re hoping he can join the musketeers once his hormones settle down and he smells less threatening. The vet found he had ‘Thelazia callipaeda’ (eye worms) and treated those as well. This is a horrible, painful disease, from a nematode carried by fruit flies, and if untreated can lead to blindness. Here’s a pic from a while ago of Ronnie.

We also took one of the many black feral cats from the other side of the village. The neighbour had brought her around having trapped her and I was assured she was the female who had given birth about 6 weeks ago. Ahem!!!! I dutifully took her to the clinic the next day only to discover she most certainly was not that cat, as during surgery the vet could not find her uterus. Poor little cat. She’d already been neutered. She’s now back home with her family and hopefully is not too traumatised.

This demonstrates the importance of ear tipping (snipping off the very tip of the ear to show the cat is neutered). The vet has now done this and the hunt continues for the mother of the kitten ...

Finally, thanks to Jane and Trevor for looking after Fort Feral and its inhabitants (and the rest of the menagerie) while we were away. You were right about Ronnie! He needed to be top of the list.

Then there is 2CC (that’s Chubby Chops II) who we think - by the chops - is Chubby Chops’ son. He is quite a character. He’s young and could be described as cocky, and appears to have decided that he’d quite like to join the gang. ‘The gang’ would be those regulars, pets and ferals, who hang around the courtyard, and 2CC’s problem is that they are not quite so keen!! They may be happier with the prospect once he’s neutered so we’ll need to schedule that in. More on neutering males later. In the meantime here is 2CC taking up a tactical position near the cat door in the gate, close to where we feed him (away from the others!).

To cut a long story short, Masi had terrible fleas (and that was causing the dermatitis on her back as she tried to scratch it), she has a lump on her side that is breast cancer, she has a misaligned jaw from an accident, she had gingivitis and she had worms in her eyes (thelazia). All this at the age of 15! Blimey!! The thelazia, gingivitis and dermatitis were all treatable and we started her on antibiotics. We kept her for around 10 days treating her and brushing her. She really is a gorgeous girl and very affectionate. In the end we took her home and we have shown her owners the flea treatment she needs monthly to avoid the dermatitis happening again. Now we see her in the village occasionally and she is so much better!  And she has a new collar:

It was so lovely to have been able to have such a visible impact on a cat. 

That experience was followed by a far sadder one in the form of Zorro, one of the musketeers. He died about three weeks ago after losing a huge amount of weight due to either feline FEV or FELV or both. We trapped him and took him to the vet twice but there was nothing to be done but palliative care. The other musketeers helped, Clem and Husky grooming Zorro as we nursed him, to the extent that you can nurse a feral cat. We all miss him hugely, and this event has underlined the importance of neutering males, as these untreatable viruses are passed on by fighting. Yes, males do become more social and less aggressive when they’re neutered - that’s a good thing! Zorro was neutered but it may have been too late in his life, or he was bitten more recently by another male who was highly likely to be unneutered.

RIP Zorro the Magnificent, 10 August 2019.

A mystery has been playing out on the gravel in the courtyard. Husky (aka Porthos of the Musketeers) has been rolling around on his back on the gravel for months. Not continuously you understand - he takes breaks.

He moves from side to side grooming his belly with his tongue, back legs akimbo, and appears to be multi-tasking by relieving an itchy patch on his back at the same time as doing his frontal ablutions.

The itchy patch is (or was) a nasty looking sore about 8 cms by 8 cms wide (since Brexit I have gone completely metric) on his middle back, and the fur around it has been falling away. You see him trying to reach around and lick it but it is in a very hard to lick place, so (we surmise) he rolls around on the gravel. 

I have taken photos of the sore and asked vets about it. One said it looked like an abscess and I should give him antibiotics. Another (Ellie from London) said hmmm, could be lick dermatitis or it could be an abrasion.

I will spare you the photos. Here is one of Husky looking normal.

Abrasion I thought ... that’s interesting ... what could cause that and why isn’t it healing? Is it an abrasion that keeps happening perchance?

​A lightbulb moment occurred. Oh dear. The long chest-like plastic box in which the Musketeers sleep ‘all a huddle’, which is located in our outside boiler room, has a cat sized hole at both ends. I say cat-sized but perhaps not Husky-sized! When I cut these holes with a heated up knife years ago none of the feral cats was anything approaching obese.

Funnily enough, I put a video on facebook a few months ago showing Husky squeezing himself in to his boudoir. See bottom of the page.

We think Husky is so fat and his gut so large that he has been literally scraping off the skin on his back to get in and out of his bed! This was a horrible moment of realisation followed by a quick trip across courtyard with knife and lighter.

I made the holes bigger and since then the nasty sore has been drying up very nicely.

The second point of this blog is to muse on why on earth Husky and his fellow Musketeers are so fat.

Husky is the biggest, but Clem Fandango is very round, and while Zorro carries his weight well he is certainly a big guy.

They are fatter than our pet cats from London and I think therein lies the clue. We have two different kinds of cat food in our house: the posh stuff for the London 4, and the cheaper stuff for the ferals. I suspect the cheaper stuff is hugely calorific while the posh stuff is more nutritious and less calorific. And because of Zita’s own tendency to stack it on, we buy grain-free dry food.

When I say ‘cheaper stuff’ I don’t mean cheapest you can get. We did buy that a couple of times and the ferals wouldn’t eat it!

Anyway, I hear you cry ‘feed the feral fatties less (cheaper but not dirt cheap) food’!

Difficult. If we feed them less they hang around the door more, upsetting our Scruffy, who the avid reader of this blog (hello again!!) will know is somewhat territorial, likes a bit of fisticuffs and has a ripped ear to prove it.

Okay well let them fight I hear you (avid reader) shout, let Scruffy off the leash so to speak. Well, that is to be avoided because while the London 4 are vaccinated against the usual things they are not vaccinated against feline HIV and the ferals are likely to be carrying that, a very nasty virus spread by bodily fluids, and therefore fighting.

Scratch the surface and there it is again, the tale of inequalities in the co existence of these two groups. The London 4 with their posh vaccinations and grain-free vet-approved nutrition, and the poor old ferals with their nasty diseases and their high calorie cheap (but not dirt cheap) kibble. Here are Jessie and Bette Davis are tucking in below.

I should point out the the fat feral cat phenomenon is rare - they are usually very skinny and need people to be kind to them, by which I mean feed them and neuter them!

​The latest in a string of medical challenges has been Husky’s very bad cat flu. He was off his food for days and was finding breathing difficult with all the phlegm. The thing with him is, of all the ferals he is one of the most feral, so we knew it would be hard to trap him if that was needed. The vet said to get some antibiotics into his food, which we tried on numerous occasions, but he wasn’t eating at all. He would follow the others to the bowls as if he was going to, and then not be able to once he was at a bowl. Instead he would sneeze and spray phlegm everywhere. Not good! For him or the others.

At that point we had just treated Clem Fandango for cat flu with antibiotics over three days, successfully. He had still been eating so that had worked a treat.

Some of you may be wondering why on earth we would give antibiotics for a virus, and you are right to question it. I did as well, and the vet told me that once the symptoms were so bad their eyes were streaming, there was very likely to be a secondary bacterial infection. So with Clem we got the antibiotics into him and three days later he was fully recuperated - as far as we could tell - which seemed to support the secondary bacterial infection theory.

Anyway, Husky, normally an enthusiastic eater and a portly figure,  was not eating. What to do? Unless he started improving - or eating - we would have to trap him to get him to the vet. Here's Husky as a reminder:

In our favour was the fact that he was clearly very ill and lacked his usual sprightly energy, but our first attempts to corner him in one of the food stations, the idea being to pounce on him with a blanket, were met with a vigorous dash for freedom, and some suspicious looks from a thicket to which he had retreated. This was no good at all, we thought. He was using the very low reserves he had to escape from us!

Attempt 2 was with an actual trap, with sardines as bait. Nil points for us, except that we could have caught any other ferals as they milled around it. And they all enjoyed some unexpected sardines. Husky was by now giving us a very wide berth, snuffling and wheezing in the undergrowth.

Attempt 3 was the most ridiculous and we exerted a lot of our own energy, each of us with a large blanket trying to corner him on open ground. I did try a rugby-style dive in his direction at one point, a spectacular failure but one which may have amused our neighbours.

At night he was still sleeping in the long, chest-like plastic box filled with cushions in our boiler room, with Zorro and Clem. We knew this from wildlife camera footage, so Attempt 4 was to first of all block one of the two entrances to the box and then wait for him to go to bed. I would then sneak  into the boiler room with the crush cage, line the cage up with the entrance to the box and hey presto, he would run into it, wouldn’t he? I had a blanket over the cage so it would appear an attractively safe dark space. Everything in place, Husky inside wheezing, I started banging the side of the plastic box. Nothing. I opened the lid of the box and there he was looking at me, but not jumping out which he would have had he been fit. Hmmm I thought.  I reached for a broom, put it in the box behind him, closed the lid so just the handle of the broom was visible, and starting nudging him towards the cage, one hand on the broom while holding the cage in place with the other hand. I felt his weight as he shuffled into the cage! I dropped the portcullis door and we had him! 

Spanish business hours (which extend to 8 pm) meant that the vet could see him straight away. The vet was wonderful as he always is, turning Husky this way and that in the crush cage to examine him, and then injecting some antibiotics through the cage. He said he’d keep him in for the night, and texted me in the morning to say the cat was recovering very well if his aggression was anything to go by. 

This is him being released later that day: 

After that, he was on daily antibiotics until the snuffling stopped. Just lately he has developed a nasty sore on his back, so he is on antibiotics again, but that’s another story. The cold has gone.

At the end of November we lost Chubby Chops. We found him dead one morning in the rain in one of the fincas. He had been hit by a car we think. There was no blood, but my vet friend in London looked at some photos and said that his face showed a major impact, so that is all we can think it was, and he had managed to get himself up the hill from the road, to where he felt safe. He had had many ups and downs with his health (see last blog) and had recently recovered well from other injuries. He was a gentle soul and had almost become the fourth musketeer. It was always a delight to see him scampering along with his funny bent tail in the air when I crossed the stile with food. We were very sad to lose him. RIP Mr CC.

​So there you have it. A year, our first being here virtually full time, with its triumphs and its sadnesses.

Wishing you all the very best in 2019 with your own four-legged creatures. We love them and we lose them, but we still go on loving them. 

I’ll leave you with a photo from our new kitchen of Calypso and Ronny waiting for their breakfasts.

Happy new year!