Bracing for the flood

From www.novanewsnow.com
Good Samaritan, caring professionals save cat's life BY WENDY ELLIOTT welliott@kentvilleadvertiser.ca NovaNewsNow.com It was a cold morning in late January when Wolfville storeowner Julie Page was driving through Canning on her way to work. Page noticed traffic was avoiding something on the road near the convenience store. “I saw it was a kitten in the middle of the road so I pulled over.” She discovered a tiny, unmoving creature with its eyes sealed shut due to a crust of infection. “It was half frozen to death,” she said. “I felt awful.” Page knocked on the door of the nearest house, but no one was home. Then she thought of the Wolfville Animal Hospital, which is located near her Retro Runway Fashion Boutique. “So I put her on the front seat beside me and cranked the heat up. She fell asleep.” Page had taken another stray cat there and knew the staff would help. Dr. Peter Bligh was shocked when he saw the kitten. Staff member Kathy Whitewood says the little feline they named Retro looked as if she had been run over. No home, no food “Her body was flattened against the blanket, her eyes and nose were so crusted it was impossible for her to see or hear properly,” Whitewood said. Bligh detected no broken bones, but one of her eyes may be sightless. He took a blood sample for feline leukemia and it was negative. “Retro was simply exhausted. She had no home, no food and weighed less than three pounds. Her bones poked out from a lustreless coat of fur,” recalls Whitewood. Technician Elissa Quimby took over Retro’s care. The cat was given antibiotics and a special hand-fed diet. Heating pads warmed her and brought her back to life. After over a month of tender care at the shelter, Retro is now ready to be adopted. An affectionate, short-haired tabby cat, she is about seven months old. Page has been back to visit Retro and was glad to see her thriving. “We already adopted a stray in the store, so I couldn’t take her,” she said. However, Whitewood invites the public to drop into the Valley Animal Shelter on Front St. to see Retro or the other cats. Wolfville and Area Animal Group spokesperson Pam Smith says Bligh and his staff do an awesome job. She fears with many unspayed cats having three or four litters a year, many people do not understand the extent of the problem. “We have to start taking responsibility for animals,” Smith says, “of the estimated 40,000 to 50,000 strays in Kings County.”
The Valley Animal Shelter has been around for a long time - at one time they had a shelter in Middleton until NIMBY got in the way of that. Now the shelter works out of the Valley Vets Animal Clinic in Wolfville and focuses their work on cats.
There's been a lot of discussion about stray cats since the Five Dollar Decision. A lot of neat and seemingly simple solutions have been offered all around.
When conservative estimates place the number of stray cats in the province at a minimum of 300,000, its no wonder that the rescue groups and the society combined do not have the resources to tackle this.
Even worse, because they have all had to set selection criteria for help, an environment has been created where most people do not believe there is any help forthcoming with strays and ferals, so by extension they believe there is no point in even asking.
Whenever there is a natural disaster such as a flood, the provincial and federal government do not abandon the region. Funding is found for emergency relief in the short term and infrastructure solutions are found to minimize recurrence.
The homeless cat problem is often referred to as the annual river and/or flooding of cats. Its an apt metaphor for a recurring problem. Without some type of provincial and/or federal 'disaster relief' funding, there may never be an achievable solution. If the proposed town hall does nothing else, it should be prepared to present a unified proposal for assistance to the provincial government.
Stories like this one should be shocking exceptions instead of being all too familiar.
I know I tend to see the world through very optimistic rose colored trifocals.I'm the same kind of cheeseball that just finished putting up a St Catrick's bit on the homeless pet site in (yet another) attempt to promote pet adoption.
Yet even this middle aged granny understands that until the 'tap is turned off' there will be no real solution. On any given day there are at least eight or nine good cats in rescue for every dog. Why is that?
Until it socially unacceptable to treat cats as disposable, this horrible wheel will just keep on rolling. The free kitten doesn't get spayed so it gets taken out to a country road and dumped.
The people who live out on the country road are generally kind, but 'fill up' pretty quickly. Many of them harden their hearts and either drive off/ shoot or poison the strays or send them off to animal control. Its not right for them to do that, and its of course still animal cruelty, but here in the real world, if it is to stop ,a better solution would be to stop the dumping. It is, after all, not right for people to dump the animals in the first place...... but ranting about the Five Dollar Decision is a post for another day.
Right here, right now, there are not enough resources to stop the flood. If it was runoff from the snow on the mountain instead of fallout from generations of human carelessness the government would have already stepped up to the plate.
If this town hall achieves nothing else, it should shoot for that.