A Home For Monty & Mimi

Monty and Mimi are our ‘special strays’. Mimi is the daughter of my cat Saidi and the mother of Xabi our latest kitten rescue. She is now about 18 months, and we have known her since she was about 8 weeks! She runs towards me when I walk down with their afternoon meal but she STILL doesn’t like to be touched, and last time I nearly caught her she bit me!

Monty is about 2 and we have also been feeding him since he was a kitten of 3 months. In the last year he has become increasingly friendly and I now think could be a tame cat. He purrs and loves to be stroked. We caught him last year for castration but at that time he reacted really badly to being at the cat rescue and we decided to free him again.

Of course if I had had the contacts, knowledge and involvement with the strays that I now have much earlier, then both these beautiful animals would have been rescued as kittens and would no longer be wild.

As I have posted before, I don’t want them to be reliant on food that we put out on an empty building plot for the rest of their lives. I want them to be in a safer environment where they are loved and wanted. Now thanks to the efforts of Kerstin in Germany I may have found the solution. They have a home waiting for them, as you can see form Kerstin’s email, and it sounds just right.

“The adoptant will be a woman… has some rabbits, birds and so on in her garden… so, she has 3 cats that do not like to be touched, too… all 3 cats are from another organisation and all 3 up to now are in the house because she does not like to let them out if they are not to be touched… if it will be better for Monty & Mimi that will be no problem to leave them out… they can go out if they want, too.. she has some friends met her and brought with them some green food for the rabbits yesterday, too.. all love the animals there… the house, she has is around a bigger village but there it is very natural and like in a village, very quiet the controller wrote that… the room are all with blankets and houses and scrathing wood for the cats… a very lovely home for animals and cats the controller wrote me yesterday evening… and ideal place for Monty and Mimi…”

Now I need to work out how we get these 2 ready to travel, hopefully in July. I have asked if just one lot of vaccinations will be ok, certainly for Mimi as this will mean we only have to take her in for 2 weeks before she travels. I think this would be much better, because it is likely that we will have to keep her in a cage. I do not think she will be easy to re-catch once we have her, and it will not be worth trying to be-friend her more before she goes.

I have been reading a good article on feral cats which says in effect that if you spend the time taming one, you really need to keep it, as feral cats find it very hard to then re-trust another human.

SOoo project Mimi and Monty will start for me next week. First I need to hear from Kerstin final thoughts re. vaccinations and then I need the next transport date from Jos and confirmation that I have boxes for them. I think it is going to be an interesting few weeks!