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Help our Dump Cats

  • New Hope

      5 January 2019
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    That's what the start of a new year feels full of.

    Plans are in place to share a stall with Kittycat Rehoming at Martinborough Fair in March.

    We have a new trap with double ends for cats to enter. This means we can potentially catch several kittens at once or perhaps two cats. We are looking at how to alter it so that the cats inside it are safer from injury and can feel calmer but just the thicker wire of this trap should mean fewer scratched up and bumped noses.

    We have two new fosterers which is absolutely magic.

    Of course, we have one million challenges. Attitudes in the community are really negative towards stray cats. Some of those attitudes find expression in unpleasant ways. We have a long way to go building partnerships and encouraging people to walk with us instead of at odd tangents or the opposite direction.

    I really hope we make steps in the right direction this year. There are many ways we can be derailed but I am seeing lots of things to give us hope. For that reason I've paired this update with an earlier picture of Quinn. Our adults are hard work, and expensive, but so worth it. She is battered but the funniest, most characterful person in the world. She's been forgetting how to hiss and watches her holiday carer attentively. Every moment we spend together (I foster Quinn) I think of the others still out there who are just like her but haven't yet had the chance. We'll never find them all and many die each week. But step by step we will build a better world for as many as we can reach. Like Quinn they'll see better days.

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  • Four donations and a downpour

      26 November 2018
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    We published this Give a Little on our Facebook page on the 22nd of November. Four incredibly kind people have come forward with donations in four days <3 Thank you so much. We really need that money to help with desexing our beautiful R litter.

    Near torrential rain is falling around my little home so I thought I'd tell you the story of Moo. Moo was our very first 'official' Dump Cat. We'd done work in the community with cats but not accessed the dump till early in 2018 when permissions were in place and we were ready in our own lives to do this work. On our first visit, Tamara and I drove around the Dump looking, looking for cats. We'd heard there were up to 300 but they are really, really good at hiding. Especially until you know what you are looking for. We didn't see any cats. We kept looking. Four circuits around the Dump later, no cats. Then the cry went up from Tamara in the passenger seat: "Kitten!!"

    It was Moo. The poor little guy was sitting in front of a skip in bewilderment, seeming completely lost, and as if looking for help. His eye was badly ulcerated and he was tiny and ooooh so cute. He skedaddled. But the next morning we found the wee guy in our trap and rushed him to Vetcare.

    His eye was very bad and surgery would cost a lot of the funds we had put aside until adoption fees could come in. We went ahead with surgery instead of putting Moo to sleep.

    His fosterers are really keen Harry Potter fans so he was dubbed Mad Eye Moody, Moo for short. Moo was starving and very badly off for the first week. I remember how excited we were when he agreed to eat his first mouthful. He ate something, turned his head, and snuggled against his fosterer.

    Moo rapidly became a characterful and outgoing wee guy, who loved playing with toys, and with his foster sister Minnie (Minerva).

    He was the first cat we sent to Neko Ngeru Cat Café for his adoption process. We've loved sending cats there from the get go. They have such an amazingly thorough adoption process and let the cats enjoy the café as they want to, putting the cat's comfort first. Moo settled right in and was soon adopted by Kelly. This was a match made in heaven and Kelly's notes to us have given us happy tears. These things really help us keep sight of why we get up at 'o god' o'clock to do another round of trap checking and are awake at night worrying if the cats in our traps are dry.

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