Starting backwards, I took a gorgeous feral female in for neutering yesterday. She was quite a handful and determined to escape at one point, but common sense prevailed and now she will have a much better life. She is one of a barn-full of cats we have been slowly chipping away at over the last year. She’d been pregnant a couple of times but no kittens came to light. Here she is with her wonderful facial markings and an alert expression that is communicating a firm intention to escape! She doesn’t have a name but perhaps it should be TortiStripe. I took her back to her barn and her brothers and sisters this morning.
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.