Firstly, since it is a long time since I have posted one of these updates, I should draw everybody’s attention to the fact that there are podcasts now featured on this blog, if you scroll down the left hand side.
Every Sunday I am recording a podcast for Almerimar Life, and the AlStrays segment of this is available on this blog, along with the recording of my new Tuesday segment on Spectrum FM Mojacar. These together are a great way of catching up with Alstrays news direct from the sources mouth!
The last week has been a little less frantic for me, which has been good as I have been suffering from a nasty cold, but in among all the activity, there has been the continual emails and photo updates. I guess with 50+ cats and kittens on my and Diane in Mojacar’s list to be helped, realistically, no week is ever going to be ‘quiet’. My challenge over the coming months will be to switch off more, once I know I am doing all that I can for the time being.
The girls in Germany do a fantastic job for our cats, fitted in around full-time jobs, but they are at least spared the distress of the front-end stuff. It is SO hard for me personally to say no when I know there are lovely animals in distress, but we are going into overload, here and in Germany, AND recently Martina reports more stray cats ARE appearing in Germany which is not good news. She is now also lying awake at night worrying about kittens she knows of out in the street. Help!!!
This week I have been quite focussed on the siam-mix litter, Chris collected for me from Mojacar some 2 weeks ago now. Cyrus, Milo, Marley, Misha and Tilly are now with Tracey and Jack getting lots of play and attention for the next 10 days, but for the last 10 days they have been occupying Iain’s spare bedroom, with me checking up on them and topping up dishes while he was at work. Thank you Iain for joining the AlStrays team.
On Thursday they went to vet Miguel at the dog protectora to start their injections, along with 2 other kittens, and a feral male for castration! Whilst there I learnt that all is in change with the dog rescue, and Miguel will not be working there after next week. This is NOT good for the dogs, but for the cats, this could be a change for the better.
Miguel will continue to work with me from his clinic in Alemria. I will have further to drive, but things should be more organised, and the environment will certainly be better for me and the cats! I do however hope that things get quickly back on track at the dog rescue, for the sake of the dogs, and I will miss my visits and some of the other people there.
Erika and I also made a quick visit to our local vet Begona with Asterix the kitten on Tuesday as he had a very inflamed stomach and had stopped eating. I have a policy of giving the foster kittens very little wet food, but ensuring they eat very good quality dry food which I order online from Germany. When this occasionally runs out Erika and I discover that out foster kids’ stomachs have absolutely no tolerance for cheap supermarket food as a stop-gap, and in Asterix’s case the temporary problem escalated!
Thursday evening was very frantic email wise, as I was trying to get up to 8 kittens on the transport to Germany on Friday. As this was not confirmed until 8pm, our plans came to nothing, as it was too late to organise all the people needed to deliver the kittens to the transport here and to their homes in Germany.
This has hardened my resolve to be largely independent of the protectora for transport in the future. I hope we will meet the German girls at the Spanish/French border for the first time later this month. Being in control of this will make everything much less stressful in the future as we will be able to plan properly, and everyone involved, including our foster parents, will know better when cats will be travelling.
Also this week I have arranged for an English mobile vet to sterilise 8 kittens and one mother cat in a lady’s home next week, which I am hoping will be the start of a working relationship with this vet, who provides a fantastic, cheap, no-frills service that is desperately needed with regards to population control.
AND finally I started the planning for what I am going to call Project Subway. You will hopefully hear more from me about this on this blog, on Spectrum FM Mojacar, and in the Euro Weekly News, in the coming weeks.
I want to help the colony of cats living on the waste ground next to the Subway restaurant on Mojacar. I will be in Mojacar at the end of next week assessing the size of the problem. Once again this colony of cats emphasises the need for more population control, where stray cats are being fed, and this whole problem will be a big area of focus for me in the coming weeks.
The German homepages are overloaded with cats and kittens looking for homes at the moment. I hope we will be able to help them all, but it is time to go back to where I started with AlStrays, which was population control. We must ensure that less stray kittens are born over the coming months, or the cat situation will never be under control and non-animal lovers will continue to see them a huge problem, and be tempted to take drastic and cruel measures.
The message I will be pushing for the rest of the year, whilst I continue with my re-homing programme, is the need for kindness with responsibility. I want to understand why it has been so hard to combine feeding with population control in the past, and to help facilitate things being much better in the future.
AND FINALLY, and not very surprisingly, I am happy to say that the striking kitten featured already has an adoptant waiting for her in Germany along with her equally beautiful sister, who has 2 matching blue eyes!!!
Ambarina