VN Lauren Williams reports on the PAW UK neutering project.
On arrival at Portugal’s Furo airport, Ian managed to stop me from wandering aimlessly and guided me towards a table where I was to meet a few of the other Volunteers, who, as always on these occasions, appeared fairly normal, but their deeper eccentricities were yet to flourish – of course these are always an asset on this kind of project.
Our team was to compromise of:
UK Vets: Jenny Stavisky MRCVS (WVS), Jennifer Sauer MRCVS and Holly Mash MRCVS (WVS)
Portugese Vets: Dr Tiago Melo; Dra Cristiane Lima
Nurses: Andrew Cox VN (WVS), Julie Price VN, Julie Kellie VN
Trappers: Ian Macfarlaine VN (and Coordinator), Harry Eckman, Sarah Blackband, Mikka Labangudgeirsdottir, Lucy Holland VN and myself.
I was to meet Lucy, my fellow trapper later that day, armed with the information that she was lovely but had ‘quiet’ moments and didn’t in reality want to kill you for lack of trapping skills (which she coped with suprisingly well) I felt fired up and ready to go… and a little nervous, so I took the opportunity to have a momentary lie down before the really hard work started.
Woken suddenly by a fierce banging on the apartment door, I realised Ian was home, and stumbling into our lovely Albufeira based apartment I struggled blearily to open the door, and no doubt made a spectacular first impression, not long after Lucy and I were off on the first of many missions.
Once again I’d managed to come to Portugal in appalling weather conditions – although there were a few more dry periods than the last time… so the worry was that most of the ferals would sensibly be tucked away somewhere, unlike the trappers who were ingeniously working out different ways to use a manual trap from their car/under a shelter and at one point from a conveniently based village cafe.
Each trapper team had a number of different colonies as their responsibility, and as usual the feeders of these colonies were asked to not put food down for a few days before the trappers came as food is the vital ingredient to a successful TNR project. It’s not often a feral cat will wander into an empty trap, however curious felines are supposed to be.
Unfortunately it can be hard for UK owners to understand restricting food before a GA, let alone a Portugese local who has been feeding ad lib for years. So it was a fairly common occurence to arrive at our sites and see vats of food put down for the colonies, bearing in mind there may well be one main feeder, but there’s usually a few minor ones ready to fill the gaps if the ferals appear to have no food that day…
As frustrating as this can be for us, it also goes to show how much the feeders and the local community do want to help their little cats, quite often we can be met with a certain amount of distrust by locals that do not know about the project (as Sarah and Mikka well know after having one of their traps thrown off a wall by a local believing they were up to no good!), as all they see are foreigners skulking around in the dark with torches, hauling cats away in cages. But after some resourceful sign language (once again Harry excels at this art) they are almost jumping around with excitement – and that’s when you’ll find the other extreme of helpfulness, when you’re sitting David Bellamy like, softly softly, just about to get those 4 cats that have been painstakingly sniffing around the manual. And then from around the corner the feeder chatters towards you holding a feral cat Pepe le Peu style, heedless to the fact that the cat is a whirling dervish in their arms, your 4 cats scatter, as you have to leap towards the car to grab a cage to put this one, incredibly put out, cat in. But hey, these things happen, and one cat is better than none (although of course four would be better than that).
A memorable site for Lucy and I was ‘the man in the shack’, which, as the site name indicates, was a man in a shack, living in a well to do area, behind a mini mini sports stadium. He was well known in the area for having this colony, and every so often cats would just be thrown out onto his driveway – of course, just because you’re a cat, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be accepted into the colony – this was certainly true for one teeny black kitten (the smallest neutered on this project, I believe approximately just over a kilogram, and, obviously really, with the smallest uterus the vet team had ever seen!). She was pathetic, just sitting next to a wall in the driveway, shivering, with huge golem like eyes, completely rejected by the world. I’m pretty certain she wouldn’t have survived long, it was like she had just lost her will.
It took a number of visits to finally catch her, a strategically placed automatic trap left around the corner; she was so light we didn’t even hear the trap go! That day was pretty lucrative trapping wise, and it’s common that the ferals have to share a white wire cage to free up the traps for further use (should go without saying that is only the ones from the same colony that share!). We’d caught two more kittens and popped them all in together, most chuffed that we’d actually caught her, and creating stories of her being the future Matriarch of this particular colony.
At this point the Vet Team were busily working their magic, 2 days into the project the team had to deal with the sudden departure of a vet who hadn’t realised the magnitude of working on a project like this, so for a while 2 vets were doing the job of 3 and us trappers just kept on bringing in the cats! Needless to say they worked their poor little socks off, and sometimes weren’t finishing til late into the night, luckily we were joined by local portugese vets (Tiago and Cris) which helped towards easing the all nighters, but it goes to show how important it is to be completely committed to a project like this.
Two nights later we were able to release Little Kit. Due to the high number of cats being neutered it is usually required that ferals from the same colony recover together in secured boxes, highlighting the obvious deviation from recovery in a Practice, where two or three recovering cats in a basket would not even be considered, but in this situation is the norm – and has no dire consequences, each cat wakes up, sits quietly, or with the occasional yowl, and is then released with a shot of antibiotic in its system back to the relative wilds of its colony.
On release our poor ostracised Little Kit seemed to run in a completely different direction to the rest of her colony. We were hoping that maybe having their scent on her would make her accepted, it seemed only time would tell…
Our next visit found her small and shivering next to her wall again. It appeared that even now, having been through this bizarre experience together, she was not going to integrate as she so needed to – it was heart breaking, but completely out of our hands and we had other colonies and wily little cats to think about – they were all sneaky as ever and each team of trappers was coming back with ever more bizarre stoies at the end of their days.
The breakthrough came one afternoon as we went to release come cats, Little Kit had moved from the middle of the driveway.. to the top end of the driveway! Now we were the pathetic ones, because sitting next to her was a kitten she had shared her recovery basket with, but, as we approached, the colony kitten upped and ran for safety (after having a glance at Little Kit), and our one did her now customary sit and shiver routine, stil, we were excited at the progess, there was hope yet!
In between these visits there were two occasions when people were not aware we had permission to be somewhere, and we had the excitement of being unexpectedly found in a secured Villa gardens and sitting on one gentelmen’s doorstep – luckily both appeared fine if slightly perplexed after the two scuffy girls, with a slight hint of fishiness explained what they were doing on their premises. It’s not always easy to tell who’s been informed of these projects and who hasn’t, and people will invariably get missed out!
Lucy was also coping quite well with my slightly erratic trapping techniques, only gently quirking an eyebrow when I managed to trap a kitten but hadn’t waited those few extra seconds to catch the mother, and then after giving me time to redeem myself, which I failed miserably at, we stumbled across the ‘Lucy technique’ of cat trapping, where you sit next to the trap (manual or automatic), pop some food in there, and then after the cat saunters into it, gently close the door behind it – this worked for us on a few occasions, you learn a new thing every time.
All in all, the stories could go on forever. Once again the trapping prooved hard but fun work, the self named ‘Renegades’ of the TNR project, getting out there and doing what needed to be done (title courtesy of Harry and Ian). Seven of the volunteers on this project were returning from previous ones, including myself, which shows not only are we truly a little mad, but also when you get a good team together you just can’t seem to be put off! And 2006 was a particularly rocking team.
On this trip, running from 4th – 11th November 2006, we managed to neuter 319 ferals, 178 of which were female and 11 needing to be euthanased on humane grounds – that’s approximately 40 cats a day, hard going for the best of us. But once again I would happily return, still as a trapper I think – although I suspect I’m not ‘team leader’ material yet, some of us are destined to be side kicks, which should never be under estimated!
As for Little Kit – the last time Lucy and I saw her was on our final release trip one evening, as our torches panned round she was hiding with two other kittens under the old man in a shacks moped, as we edged closer all three kittens turned and ran together towards the hiding places of their colony – and it doesn’t get much better than that.
