Cat and Overturned Wheelbarrow

An orange/ginger bobtailed feral cat decides to explore an overturned wheelbarrow for no particular reason. There is a holding cage in the background.

We just got through a big storm which featured 100 mile-per-hour wind and knocked down power poles:
This is the view of our road. Well, it was, anyway. Today they sawed up these power poles and put up new ones. And so we have electricity again! For now... We get big storms from time to time. On the east coast, people call these "superstorms" ... Here we call it, Tuesday. You probably never hear about it because this is the northwest coast. Nobody cares about us. That's a fact.

The cats are all fine, but unhappy about the situation. The "Cat Condo" I built for feeding was actually picked up and moved several feet. And it weighs a lot!  I got it back in place, though.

Adopted

Peng - her name means Fair. Here she has a little cold still, but not that long ago she was a very very sick feral kitten. She was so sick, she looked dead. The vet thought she wouldn't survive. But with 24 hour care and medicine, we changed all that. Peng turned out to be a friendly and unafraid little manx - one who loves everyone and loves life. Today, she has a forever home with a loving family.

Bai, his name means white. Like, if we said Bai Mao - we would be saying white cat. It isn't clever but I had moments to name him before he went to the vet. He's a fortunate kitty. I was on my way to the vet with two sick kittens, Peng and Penny and I made a lucky grab, snatching this little boy from certain death. Dr. Yackley worked him into the schedule: Antibiotics, worm medicine and flea treatments saved his life.  Now he has a home of his own where he can be Bai hu .. the White Tiger.

Penny was named for a character on The Big Bang Theory. She has cute white socks and even when she was a feral she had a pretty laid-back personality. Then she became a pet. Then she got a home of her own.


This is what the Feral Cat Rescue project is all about. And it isn't just me, out there hunting for lives to save; spending my time and money rehabilitating the unloved cats of the world. No. It's really a lot of people. And it's you, the reader.

Thank you.

Faces

Faces... I do see a lot of them every day, and sometimes they all start to become a blur. I care about each one, though. It's just that there are days when I forget who is who, at least for a moment or two.

Thanks to some help from Etsy for Animals,(see their stuff) and one extra-generous reader, I have a new trap/transfer cage that will help a lot. I hope that was an okay purchase; I needed this one. It's a drop trap but fairly sophisticated with a separate transfer cage that attaches to it. Like this...

I have regular inexpensive one-door live traps but they just catch whoever happens to wander into them - this trap is more for catching specific cats, which is what I need, working with a large colony.

It's already producing results but I will show you those, later. Thank you, Etsy Artists Helping Animals and Donna.

The Calendar is Here! Feral Life 2013

The Feral Life 2013

It's the main thing I do to help feed and provide medical care for the feral cats: The Feral Life photo art calendar. All year, I've been working on this project in the background - finding just the right images for every season and every month.  And it's also true that I'm never really satisfied but at least in this case I feel that The Feral Life 2013 is the best yet.

This year I've found the highest quality printing at the best price point. It's been tough because all the printing services keep jacking up the cost, making my choices somewhat frustrating.. While I will be making a Zazzle version available (the service we used last year, and still my main go-to service for prints and t-shirts) this year's best bet is Lulu.com: They've kind of thrown themselves into trying to be the best there is for calendars and my author's galley print says mission accomplished. It's the best quality glossy heavy art stock paper we've seen since the Redbubble prints, but this one is affordable.

Oh, and another new thing: This calendar has both US and Canadian holidays - plus Feral Cat Day.  Canadian FCRP fans are no longer shortchanged. I'm really happy about that.

Please check it out, and if you have any problems let me know. This is a new printer for me and while the calendars are the best yet, I don't really know how well they're going to be with customer service, etc. So let me know!

The more adventurous among our little family on the Internet could consider submitting product reviews/stars - it helps. And everyone, I hope you'll share this calendar far and wide! See it: The Feral Life Photo Cat Calendar 2013.

A Wildcat In The Jungle

Always on alert for predator and prey alike, our tabby "wild cat" explores her jungle. Really tame for a non-pet, this kitty is ear-tagged as you see, and is a regular fixture around here.

All the updates on the fire are in the previous post. Thankfully, we got all of our kitties back.

We need to try to find someone to remove the burned-out trailer before we try to find another old one for a cat shelter. I guess that's our summer project.

Fire at the Feral Cat Trailer

Our main Feral Cat refuge trailer caught fire about two hours ago! At this point I don't know about lost cats. I hope they all got out. I tried. It may be quite a while before I know more. And I don't feel very well at the moment. It's a sad day. I will update this post when I have something to report.

UPDATES:
Friday PM: There are 4 cats unaccounted for, but I'm still hoping that they are just hiding. It was pretty scary. I can't say for sure, though. The cause of the fire was determined to be an electrical short in a a ceiling light.

Friday/Saturday 2 AM ... I found Basquiat, or he found me. He was one of the missing ones. He's fine but shaken and still scared. Keeping him in my sister's house overnight.

Saturday AM: Still missing at this time are Gizmo, Gadget and Mort.  I haven't given up hope, though.

Saturday 11:30 AM: MORT is still with us!  I found him today IN the burned out trailer...but obviously he'd gotten out during the fire. He was just inspecting what was left of his home.  Basquiat was there too, both imploring me to please fix it.

MORT : Alive And Well ...But Sad

Not much left

Monday PM: Gizmo finally showed up for an evening feeding, I think. He's a very nondescript tabby so I'm not always certain when I see him. He looks lost and unhappy but physically fine..

This is Why I Don't Ship Kittens! (News)

We have so many kittens and cats needing homes and from time to time someone from far away is interested, but I can't send cats via airlines... this is why: Cat Dies After Flight to Connecticut. This time it was Delta but there have been other stories; I don't think it is an isolated incident. It's such a sad and unnecessary death.

We don't really know how many animals are killed by airlines. It could be a lot.

The Department of Transportation tracks animal deaths in transit, but no one keeps tabs on how many die of cold or heat in cargo holds or elsewhere, said veterinarian Louise Murray, vice president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital in New York City.

Supposedly every animal death is looked into but the penalty for the airlines is usually just a letter of warning. Not much incentive to stop killing animals.

I'll drive quite a ways to deliver a kitten but I will not entrust it to the cruel fates of uncaring baggage handlers. Oh, I'm sure there are some who care about animals so don't write to me and tell me how I've offended baggage handlers! The point is, there are too many who don't care - as we see here.

Utah Wants People to Shoot Feral Cats, Others (News)

A Utah state representative is trying to legalize the shooting and outright slaughter of cats and dogs. They don't even have to be feral, really, the killer only need "believe" that the animal was feral. Pretty scary. There is a petition to sign, too, to stop this. I don't have a lot of faith in petitions... and I'm losing faith in humanity, too. Utah Bill Declares Open Season on Feral Animals | Animals | Change.org

New Blog Design

Well, I've been working on this in the background, intending to introduce it New Years day, 2011... but a couple of people have told me recently that they had problems using the comment system here. I'm not sure why, but my old design had an issue that I might have corrected with the new one.  The only other thing it could be is the fact that blogger has recently switched how comments are processed. I think they now go through googleusercontent.com, so perhaps the offsite comment processing causes problems with some browsers... like, if you are using Firefox with NoScript and you haven't allowed the google site.  Unfortunately, I don't have any control over how blogger processes comments.

Generally speaking, I allow all comments including blogger members (of course) plus those with an OpenID account and/or just a google account --even just Name and URL, which can be anything. Sometimes I have anonymous commenting turned on too. It comes and goes: I will allow it for a while and when I start getting cat-haters posting I turn it off again. Right now, it's on so you can comment anonymously. If you are having a problem you might want to make sure that you are selecting the correct kind of comment posting (Google/OpenID/Name-URL/Anonymous) and that you don't have scripts from this site or googleusercontent.com blocked.

Let me know what you think of the new design, anyway. :)

A Cat's Tongue is Really Fast! (News)

A team of engineers from M.I.T., Virginia Polytechnic and Princeton decided to examine the mystery of the cat's tongue. And what we found out is that a cat's tongue, when lapping, is FAST ...really fast: Cat's lap typically at a rate of about 4 times per second - a bit too fast for the human eye to detect anything more than a blur.

Cat's tongues are very efficient too. Where a dog's tongue moves slowly, forming a crude cup shape to pull water up to its mouth, a cat cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water. The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.

This whole operation depends on a cat's instinctive ability to calculate just the right balance of forces between gravity and inertia. So now you know that your cat is a physicist ...along with his/her many other talents. Cats Lap With Just Tip of the Tongue, Engineers Find - NYTimes.com

Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now.