I’ve been working through some trial software to identify grant opportunities for the Retreat and found the Rachael Ray Foundation works specifically to save domestic animals. It looked like a nice fit for us so I started to investigate further. One of the requirements for grant application submission is to be a member of Best Friends. Best Friends is a network of shelters and rescues and again it’s a nice fit for the Retreat. One other requirement is also to join the Shelter Pet Data Association (SPDA). The SPDA maintains statistics on each shelter’s activity and therefore requires you to upload monthly your numbers of your animals by category — intakes, transfers in and out, deaths, etc.
The Retreat uses a simple data base program, To Your Rescue which creates a record for each cat we have on hand. We enter medical data and key milestones and its report generator provides the information the SPDA needed with no effort. I’m expecting that by participating in these two organizations, Mandarin’s Retreat will gain some needed credibility as a responsible rescue and open up opportunities to share information, ask questions or yell for help with similar organizations. I don’t like re-inventing the wheel and I’m willing to ask for help. Knowing where or who to ask is the key, of course.
In other happenings at the shelter, we have released all the named kittens to perpetual Kitten Day Care in the Retreats offices. You forget just how much chaos seven young kittens can produce. I’m currently looking for the battery cover of my computer mouse. The cover was removed and the mouse remained on my desk. How the kittens accomplished that is currently unknown. Here is a picture on the kittens plus two sister cats eating supper last night.
Last week was busy and I didn’t spend much time on social media. Having eight kittens chasing their tails and falling off of counter tops at Kitten Day Care (KDC) in the office kept us on our toes. In addition, we’ve been dealing with two fairly sick cats: Cody and Carmello. Cody is not quite one and Carmellito is anywhere from 16 to 20 years old.
We got the big ginger dude in a pretty sorry shape. His constant diarrhea, matted fur and lethargic attitude had indicated a need for a vet visit a while ago, but his vet trip did not happen until he arrived at the Retreat. Two days at our friendly clinic with a bunch of meds and pain killers plus a gentle washing brought him back from the vet in somewhat better shape. The initial diagnosis was possible cancer and definite kidney problems; but now we’re not so sure. The meds, good food and a large kennel have worked wonders. His kidney food arrived, which he begrudgingly eats and his meds has reduced the size of his kidney. We’re not sure what’s going on but he’ll have a follow-up next week to see what’s what. The original plan was for Mr C to stabilize and survive the weekend. He’s done a lot more than just that, so we’re optimistic.
Carmillo
Cody, on the other hand, is a different story. He has only one working eye and has survived panleukopenia. As many of those who raise panleuk kitties know, survival is merely the beginning. The awful virus can leave deep claw marks inside of a kitten’s body and Cody did not escape his illness unscathed. As it turns out, Cody ended up with a pancreatic enzyme insufficiency. It took us a while to get the diagnosis, because his other gut symptoms somewhat covered everything up. We have his enzyme supplements coming in tomorrow and we’re hopeful he’ll continue to kick ass and take names.
Now to the incidentals. Most folks when they think of cats and cat rescues probably think of costs as food, litter, and vet bills. They would be right as these three items are the majority of our monthly costs. However, the deliveries this week painted a wider canvass of expenses. We received 1,000 t-shirt type plastic bags, a new kennel (to expand Carmello’s space), two surgical collars, one new kitty tower (for KDC), one kennel scratching post, blue nitrate gloves, 2,000 syringes and a micro-chip reader.
“Why do we need so many plastic bags”, you ask? We use about five plastic bags a day to handle the 60 pounds of cat poop that goes to the trash. While we buy groceries and reuse the bags when we can, we do not generally have 150 used grocery bags lying around and we have to buy them. Nitrate gloves and syringes are an easy guess for taking care of sick kitties but each expense goes into the budget.
Fortunately our @Walmart and our @Amazon business accounts let us purchase tax free. That helps. @Chewy offers us discounts from time to time. Ours friends in social media offer us ideas and suggestions for savings and time savers. It’s hard work running a cat rescue and while it’s a labor of love, expenses are a constant concern. If you would like to help, please hit our donate button on the landing page.
Tabz had been hanging around our backyard for what seems forever. She would always come around to be fed when Mrs H brought out the food bowls. Our colony of about eight feral cats had gradually taken over our back yard especially after we added kitty tubes and a covered litter box (it’s hard to poop in the stone covered ground). Tabz was always a skittish and standoffish girl but she gradually started coming up to speak to Mrs H. Churus helped.
When Tabz came of age and started having kittens we tried in earnest to catch her. It was interesting, though; while she ran from us she would bring her sick kittens and put them on our backdoor step. I think this started when on night at about 0300. Mrs H woke up with a start and thought she heard an unusual noise, so she went to check the backyard CCTV. What she saw was blood curdling – a kitten ran after Tabz and fell into our pool. After an unscheduled pool dive, the kitten, soon to be named Luna, was brought inside, dried off and treated for ocular herpes. Luna’s eyes had been sealed shut with gunk that she couldn’t see…hence the accidental dash into the pool. Mrs H went to feed the feral cats the next morning and spoke to Tabz. She told her that we had her kitten and that the kitten was fine. A day later another kitten with ocular herpes was placed at our backdoor. The day after that we received the third and final kitten. Thus was our relationship with Tabz. She would run from us and refuse to get into a trap but would bring us her kittens; first the ill ones, then all the others once they were of age.
About three years ago, we had another major incident with Tabz. One very cold Saturday in January, I started the car remotely to warm it up and took off to do Saturday chores. I didn’t get very far before I started getting engine warning signs and loss of the electrical system. Hours later at the repair shop, we were discussing a new alternator and various belts when one of the mechanics brought in a cat’s tail. Ooops! An $800 reminder to bang on the hood of your car and then bang again, because it didn’t work the first time. I sent a pic to Mrs H and she immediately stated it was Tabz’s tail. Well, shit. If we couldn’t catch the damn cat to TNR her, how could we catch her to take her to the vet for a tail inspection? We sighted the cat several times over the next several days and it appeared that Tabz had enough of a stubby tail left she avoided incontinence problems.
Things continued on like before but with a shorter tail until about two months ago. Mrs H had put an old airline cat carrier near our front door for a feral cat named Friend. He’s our community Alpha who likes to guard the door and watch out for the FedEx guy. Mrs H thought he could use a little shelter so she put out the carrier. Within a week or so we noticed Tabz going in and out of the shelter. Closer inspection revealed four fuzzy kittens just a few days old. Our old dilemma of cat catching struck again and we had to be careful. We didn’t want her to move the kittens. We decided the most logical answer was to wait.
We had removed the door to the airline carrier before we put it by the door so we couldn’t trap Tabz and her kittens with it. We did notice as the kittens got a little older, Tabz would leave the carrier for some RNR and me time. Watch for her departure, we exchanged the old carrier with one with a door, stuffed the old towel back into it, transferred the kittens and waited for the return of Momma Tabz. Tabz noticed the switch but didn’t remove her kittens.
The situation remained static for about a week when Mrs H walked passed the carrier, saw everyone inside, reached down and closed the door. We had prepared our “double-long” kennel in our office for the family and we just placed the carrier inside the kennel and opened the carrier door. Within an hour or two with the kennel covered with a blanket, everyone was calm, making themselves at home. Mama Tabz was wary of us but, oddly, also friendly and seemingly a bit relieved. She gleefully accepted two Churus a day, licking the stuff off our fingers. Perhaps, just perhaps, we’d eventually be forgiven for our catnapping.
A week later we received a request to foster a little lost Main Coon kitten, Freya. She was tiny, skinny and it bad need of either formula or a mama to nurse. We carefully added her to Tabz litter and the momma cat immediately took her in. We think she heard her cry before we came into the room and got interested. About ten days later, our TNR partners came in possession of two kittens who had been separated from their mom by an unthinking human. We kept these two in a separate kennel for about a week for quarantine reasons and they were sorta okay but not thriving. Last week, we let all the kittens play together in our ODC – Office Day Care. This gave Tabz a bit of a respite as her kittens were getting bigger but the kennel wasn’t. At the end of ODC, all seven kittens were returned to Momma Tabz and the two smaller new kittens were brought into the family.
Mama Tabz gave us all sorts of looks and demanded a third Churu per day, but she did take the kittens in and almost immediately started fussing over them. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see and hear two little fuzzy jelly beans respond to a foster mama’s cries and trills and listen to them purr contentedly while being cleaned.
9–So, this is our Tabz. She is a feral momma cat who is just a wonderful mother to not only her own, but also to the three little ones she’s adopted. Once the kittens are grown some more, we’ll have the Humane Society or Animal Services put them up for adoption and we’ll get Tabz spayed. Whether we can keep her inside the house or we must return her to the backyard colony remains to be seen. Watch our social media and our blog and we’ll keep you informed.
Rather than post a Caturday Cat this morning, I thought I would catch everyone up on the happenings around Mandarin’s Retreat. The Retreat has had to spend a bunch of money – into four figures – fixing the HVAC system in the Retreat’s Office. We remodeled our back porch into a home office and IT center about 10 years ago. It has since morphed into a cat medical center/transition site for sick or new cats in the Retreat.
Our mini-split in the office has been acting up for several years, mostly I think from the large amount of cat hair that gets captured in its filters. April was time for its scheduled maintenance and it had stopped working. The maintenance team came it, worked on it and left; but the HVAC didn’t work at all. We were sweltering in the heat and Tabz and her four kittens were not having any fun either. I called a new HVAC team who very promptly identified the problem, offered several solutions and we decided to toss out the old system and get a new one. Two days later the system was installed and we were cool. This came at the cost of about 1.5 months of operating expenses for the Retreat. Sigh…we can’t receive enough donations to cover vet costs, how are we going to cover the cost of the new system?
This leads me to ponder on what encourages folks donate to charities like ours? We take in old cats, sick cats, and cats that need help. We also try to house cats from families who have been evicted from their homes and domestic violence victims who whose emergency shelters won’t accept their cats. While this service is not used very often, we would like to think having a place to put their feline pets enables them to leave an unsavory situation.
But that goes back to the heart of the question; is doing “good things” enough? What do donors want to see in return for their hard earned cash? We don’t have mugs or t-shirts we can provide to donors (at least not yet); so what “value” do donors need in return. What should we post? Are pictures of cats enough? I personally don’t want to try to pull at the heart strings and write about sob stories involving our cats. Mandarin’s Retreat is suppose to be a happy place, a resting and healing place for the sick and handicapped. We had our logo designed to show a happy place and we want to continue in that vane.
My wife and I fund Mandarin’s Retreat out of our own pockets and in our own home. We don’t mind the cost, but in these days of inflation and product downsizing, we need help. We’ve looked into fund raising experts and those who say, “For only $3,500 a year, we can provide you with multitude of grant opportunities.” Yah, right. You want me to spend 10% on my yearly budget in hopes of getting a grant. I know you have to spend some money to make some money but where does one begin and what do donors want for their contributions?
If you have any ideas, suggestions or comments about this diatribe, please email us at meow@mrhwc.org.
