Hello Grrreat cat people!

Welcome to TCS!  And thank you for helping those sweet babies!

Thanks for the warm welcome, I'm happy to have found the site and hope I'll be able to help others along the way too. I have certainly learned a lot about what not to do and discovered easier ways to do things too.
 

Sounds like you will fit right in around here! Welcome to TCS!
 

Thank you so much for caring for all those furry babies. This site is a great place to find/share information and encouragement as well. Welcome!!!

Thanks for your kind words,

Yes, that is why I joined. I've spent a lot of my free time here and have found a wealth of information that I might find useful in the times to come. When you care for 30 + cats you have to be armed with information and be able to reach out for help when you need to.

I came across this animated cat picture the other day... reminds me so much of my sweet Baxter ( I mostly called him Baxter Boo Boo), because he used to like to sleep on top of things and would usually hang over the edge of wherever he was sleeping and most often would fall off.  He would then pick up his head and make a sweet little sound in protest. I would always say "poor Boo Boo" and then he would just lay down, right where he was and go back to sleep. He was just as big as this cat was, but unfortunately my computer crashed and I lost all my pics of him.



He was a big boy and the most beautiful Tuxedo cat I've ever seen. He also had one of the sweetest most gentile personalities of any cat I have known and was the first cat that came to me for a home. I was sitting outside one evening, three years ago now, and he walked through the gate over to where I was sitting and jumped up in my lap like he had always done this. He would always turn facing away from me looking out over the landscape with me.

We would sit like that as long as I would sit there. He looked very healthy, bright eyed and was a stocky boy of about 5 months old I suspect. He never seemed hungry or at least he never begged and I believed he belonged to someone who might have recently moved into the neighborhood, because I had never seen him before. He continued to come for the next week and every time was the same, he would jump up in my lap and settle down to look out over the landscape with me, just being content to be.

After a week of this and on the night it was decided he was home, this knowing came over me, it was not a voice I heard, but an all consuming knowing I had that he was hungry. I put him down and when inside to get a can of food, dish and spoon and took it out to him. When he saw what was going on he couldn't contain his enthusiasm  or the fact that he was starving. He attacked that food like it was the first he had been offered in a very long time and I sat and cried, because he had been hungry all those evenings he had come to sit with me and I didn't know. I never made that mistake again I can assure you.

Sadly he is no longer with me, I had him neutered and he was given the mandatory rabies vaccine at the time and all seemed well, with the exception of how sluggish he was for several days after. I kept a close eye on him and by the third day he started to have some very bad seizures, something he had never had, in fact when he was checked out at the vet he was pronounce to be very healthy. I ended up having to rush him to an emergency vet, because it was Easter Sunday. It was obvious he was declining rapidly, and in fact was dieing.

Tests were run and everything humanly possible was done to save him and in spite of it all, he couldn't be saved. You can imagine the devastation involved here, nothing could have prepared me for this outcome. I chose to bring him home and bury him, even though it was hard, because I just couldn't bare to part with him.

I could never shake the feeling that this was the result of giving him the vaccination at the same time he was neutered, what other explanation could there be. The vet that tried to save him was inclined to agree with me considering all she knew about vaccines.

I did a lot of research and read more horror stories told by pet owners, dogs and cats alike with similar outcomes, than I could ever have imagined. All of this resurfaced  recently when one of my rescues was trapped and picked up by animal control, Molly is her name, another beautiful Tuxedo cat. I looked in vane for her for nearly eight days before I found what had happened to her. She was trapped and picked up on the eighth of March, which was my birthday, yea, happy birthday to me!

I found out Molly was at an Animal Control location on the evening of the seventh day of her captivity and was there before they opened the following morning. I brought proof of her shot records, as required, but in my haste to get there and free her I'd accidentally brought Baxter's records instead. I was allowed to bring Molly home, with a promise of providing them with her records at a future date.

What was interesting about this was when I found Molly's records I was comparing the two and what I noticed was that Molly's vaccine was administered for one year and Baxter's was for 3 years. It was like I'd been socked in the gut. I realized all the tragic stories I'd read about involved the three year vaccine. There is a lot more I could add to this post regarding this subject, but I'll table it for now because I've gotten a bit long winded here. I tend to do that when I'm passionate about something. Hey, isn't it always the passionate people that fight causes.

It just occurred to me, I might have posted this in the wrong forum, if so please feel free to let me know and I'll move it.