(Header image created with microsft co-pilot)
This shift started with some misfortunes;
Homing Pigeon
Picked up an weakened homing pigeon from under a chair on the balcony of a funeral home. It was tricky, but I’m glad I managed! We brought him to the rescue centre.
Elusive Cat
It’s not that I wish animals to be in need, but I like to be busy helping them. It seemed like a long wait until our next rescue.
It was a(nother) call from a guy who was angry we hadn’t been to collect an injured / sick cat. This wasn’t exactly true – we had been to collect the cat, but the cat wasn’t there when we arrived. The cat’s owner was abroad for 5 weeks and couldn’t be contacted. Meanwhile, their cat wandered the local neighbourhood reportedly in clear distress by walking funny on one side and regularly falling head-over-heels.
So we tried again today, but when we got there, the cat wasn’t.
Searching…
We used a ladder to look over a wall and into the owner’s back garden. There was no sign of the cat. We scoured the alleyways behind the property. At one point I thought I heard the cat wailing, except it called “Papa” and I realised it was a kid. After 20 minutes we still couldn’t find the elusive cat who, we’d heard from the owner, was usually always somewhere nearby.
Cat traps
In a case like this, we might use a cat trap. It’s nothing like a mouse trap because the aim is to capture a cat (and keep it alive) so that it can be collected and checked. In essence the cat trap is a cage with a vertically sliding door that is triggered when the cat sits on the spring-loaded floor inside the cage. When the door closes, a gap of about 5 cm is left between it and the floor so that the cat’s tail won’t be harmed. For what they are, these cat traps are insanely expensive!
Leaving one behind comes with great responsibility – not just financial, but for the welfare of the cat that’s caught. The trap needs to be checked every hour so that if a cat is trapped in one, then it will be for a maximum of an hour. Clearly, sitting in a trap isn’t a nice experience. The trap also needs to be closed overnight because other than the difficulty of checking it every hour, there is a chance that other nocturnal animals may be trapped in it.
For these reasons, cat traps are usually left (and secured) in a person’s property and this was a no-go now as the property was vacant. To make things more complicated, many cats prowled the local area so there was no guarantee that the injured cat we were looking for was going to be the one found in the trap if we left it in an alleyway. The finder, who lived a few houses away, didn’t want the cat trap in his house because he owned a cat himself.
Frustrations
He grew increasingly frustrated we couldn’t do anything, but there was no cat. I heard him mumbling You can kill a man easier in the Netherlands than you can help an injured cat. He saw I’d heard. “Don’t tell anyone,” he added.
Believe me. My lips are sealed.
Sadly we left. There was nothing we could do, other than ask him to call us again if he saw the cat and was able to trap it. It was painful for me to leave the situation knowing there’s a sick or injured cat out there, but it must be harder for the finder who sees the cat in distress.
Another sad kitten story
We came back to the base and it was full of people; in a short while, the quarterly(?) volunteers’ meeting was going to take place. Having seen the minutes from the previous meeting I’d decided not to go. But I wasn’t in a rush to get home; 2 volunteers had adorable kittens on their shoulder / chest, and their young mother was in a cage.
I approached her. Most people were gathered around the kittens; the mother surely must have found it difficult; being in a cage, in a new place, amongst new faces, in a noisy environment, and in view of her kittens out of her reach. She came to the front of the cage, licked my finger and tried headbutting me! She was clearly a social cat who was used to people and had been well-cared for and loved to show this much trust.
This young cat family had been taken from a Ukrainian family because the Dutch government had ruled they weren’t allowed to have pets. “Simple as that,” I was told. The happy bond between human and beast was broken. A very, very sad story, and understandably heartbroken Ukrainians.
In a previous company I worked for, some of the projects were related to defence. We were allowed to refuse to work on those projects on moral grounds. I don’t know the back-story with this governmental ruling and the Ukrainians, but unless I knew the owners were being unkind to their pets I think I would not have taken part in this call-out.
