Cuteness interlude

You all like photos of foster kittens, right?

You can only see four of them there. For some reason one is always off doing something else (always a different kitten).

They are probably around three weeks old. They had not quite gotten the concept of solid food yet and were not eating well in the shelter where I was working last week, and were underweight. One of them had a bad upper respiratory infection, which was manifesting as bad conjunctivitis (inflammation around her eyes). She looks much better today after meds and someone willing to mix up juuuust the right concoction of milk replacer plus canned food.

 

 

It’s hard to tell in this photo, but her eyes are still pretty red. I’m not worried about her any more, though. She will do fine.

The Feral Freedom program: leave outdoor cats where they are!

Even in parts of the country in which the dog overpopulation problem is mostly under control, the cat overpopulation problem is still rampant. Cats entering shelters often have a less than 50% chance of adoption, down to 10% or less in many communities. Certainly, unfriendly feral cats coming in to shelters have a miniscule chance of adoption, so small that most shelters euthanize them rather than trying to find them a barn home.

On the other hand, cats living outdoors often do very well for themselves. Contrary to the popular assumption that the life of an outdoor cat is nasty, brutish, and short, most of the cats coming through trap-neuter-return (TNR) programs are healthy. They may not live as long as indoor cats, but they are not miserable. To some people, the idea of euthanizing a cat rather than run the risk of its being hit by a car in a year seems silly or even a little mean.

The city of Jacksonville, Florida, recognized that the choice for outdoor cats, feral or not, was either to be spayed/neutered and returned to their territory, or euthanized. That was it. Certainly feral cats stood no chance of adoption, and the influx of friendly cats was so great that their chances weren’t much better. That realization was the seed of Jacksonville’s Feral Freedom program. This program facilitates the sterilization, vaccination, and return of all healthy outdoor cats that are presented to the shelter. These cats come from the surrender of “stray” cats and from active trapping. Rather than become shelter inhabitants, they are returned to the location where they were originally trapped or picked up.

Does it cost a lot? Because the city was holding all cats for five days in case an owner came to reclaim them, and paying for euthanasia and disposal of the body, the program costs the same as the previous policy, or a little less.

Do owners fail to find actual stray cats when they are not held in a shelter? Research has shown that stray cats are less likely to be reunited with their owners in shelters than if they are left outside to find their own way home. Many owners do not expect to see their outdoor cats daily, and may not start looking for a missing cat until after it has already been euthanized in a shelter.

Are outdoor cats nuisances? Some certainly can be, although sterilization does reduce nuisance behavior, and vaccination reduces disease. (Cats are much more likely to get sick in a shelter than outdoors.) Feral Freedom provides assistance to people with complaints about individual cats. They will trap, sterilize/vaccinate, and return the cat, and then suggest that people who want it off their property try methods like motion-sensitive sprinklers. (And hilarity ensues.)

Do the good citizens of Jacksonville approve of this program? Jacksonville initially implemented the program on the sly without a lot of publicity, but did publicize it once it had proven to reduce cat euthanasia rates in shelters. The city receives complaints about individual cats, but rarely about the program as a whole. Most people, when they understand that the cat’s choice is euthanasia or return, accept that putting the cat in a shelter is not a humane option. (Some people do disagree. That will be true of almost any public policy, except maybe the one where every new baby gets a chocolate eclair.) But cats will not be relocated, even problem cats. Aside from the question of how well a cat will do when dropped down into a new territory, there is nowhere for them to go. There are no places that want more outdoor cats.

And, of course, the ethical questions. Isn’t it the job of a shelter to provide care for homeless animals? Of course it is. But if the shelter does not have the resources to provide for all of them, does it become the job of the shelter to kill them when they are not otherwise suffering? And aren’t cats better off in a good home? Of course they are. But if there is no good home available (or even bad one), are they better off dead?

I certainly recognize that this approach to cat overpopulation is a controversial one and that many will disagree with it. (If there is interest, I may blog later about the questions of communicable disease in outdoor cats, or predation of wildlife by outdoor cats.) But I think we have reached the point in dealing with the pet overpopulation problem where revolutionary ideas are worth trying, because we have tried almost everything that is non-revolutionary. Don’t get me wrong: euthanasia of healthy domesticated animals has certainly decreased in the past decades. But there is still a long way to go. As one of my faculty advisors said to me recently, “It’s an exciting time in shelter medicine. Everything’s on the table.”

For more information:

• Feral Freedom Guide from Best Friends
• Feline Shelter Intake Reduction Program FAQs (PDF)
• TNR Fact Sheets from Vox Felina
• Feral Freedom comes to DeKalb country, Georgia

Ten's company for cats in shelters

Austin Bouck at Animal Science Review recently posted about the benefits of group housing for cats in shelters. (Well, sort of recently. I meant to write about this two weeks ago!) Apparently adopters prefer group-housed cats as adoption prospects. Decreasing the length of an animal’s stay in a shelter is a very important tool in decreasing shelter overcrowding, so this is good information for shelters. Austin adds, “Arguments against housing cats in groups are primarily based on disease management,” citing upper respiratory infection (URI) as the most common disease seen in sheltered cats. (Too true.) So is group housing a good idea for cats in shelters, then? What should shelters be considering if they are designing a plan for cat group housing? I turned to my new bible, the Association of Shelter Veterinarians’ Guidelines for Standards of Care in Animal Shelters, to see what it had to say about group housing. It has an entire section on this topic.

Risks and benefits of group housing
Absolutely, group housed animals can pass infectious disease back and forth. A quick Dog Zombie sidenote about infectious diseases of cats in shelters, not covered by the Guidelines in this particular section: about half of shelter cats will get a URI within two weeks of their introduction to the shelter, and they may well pass that URI to other cats with whom they come in contact. However, the main cause of URI in shelters is stress, which causes viruses which the cats have been carrying without trouble for years to reactivate. So if the group housing is lower stress than individual housing, I am less concerned about URI. I would be concerned about ringworm (highly contagious!), as well as FIV (feline AIDS) and FeLV (feline leukemia). These last two are less infectious, but very serious (life shortening) if acquired. All animals should be tested for FIV/FeLV and inspected for ringworm lesions before they are put in with other cats. The Guidelines do cover these diseases, but not in the group housing section.

Aside from risk of infectious diseases, what else should we be concerned about? “Stress, fear, and anxiety.” Some cats like group housing. Some don’t. Make sure you don’t put a timid cat in with bullies. It can be easy to miss these kinds of social interactions in a busy shelter, but if you are group housing animals, you have to take the time to make sure everyone gets along.

Speaking of which, it can be difficult to keep an eye on everyone in a group housing situation. A cat in a cage is easy to check up on. But if you have 10 cats in one room, it is easy to miss the little one who hides in her hide box all day. It is even harder to tell who is not eating, or who had that stinky diarrhea in the litter box. So group housing can be a lot of work to manage. But the consequences are serious if some cats become sick and early signs are missed.

There are benefits, though, even aside from increased attractiveness to adopters. Many cats very much enjoy the company of other cats. They like the opportunity to sleep together, groom each other, and play together. Shelters can be very sterile environments, and there’s little that is as enriching to a social animal as a well-matched member of your own species.

Facilities
One danger of group housing is that an overcrowded shelter might see it as a way to save space. Well designed group housing won’t actually save any space, although it may redistribute space (enabling more vertical space, which cats enjoy so much). The Guidelines recommend at least 18 square feet per cat. That’s a lot, but it provides cats with room to get away from each other when they need to. Of course, you also need enough feeding stations, litter boxes, hide boxes, and elevated perches. I have been told that it’s a good idea to have more elevated perches than cats so no one is fighting over the best one! If you look at cats in group housing, it is often true that most of them are off the ground at any one time.

Selection
We already talked about some selection criteria for cats being put into group housing: do they like other cats? Are they sick? Cats should be grouped by age (no energetic kittens in with old codgers). Obviously, intact males should not be put in with intact females (you’d be surprised, but some facilities don’t take these simplest of precautions against breeding).

Since we’re worrying about disease, it’s worth mentioning that a lot of population turnover (a new cat put in to an enclosure whenever an old one is removed) is a prime cause of disease. Remember, a cat is liable to come down with URI soon after it arrives at the shelter. Do you want to put it in with a population of healthy cats? (I said that the cats came down with URI because they were stressed, but that doesn’t mean that the virus that reactivates isn’t infectious to other cats, not to mention bacteria that take advantage and colonize a sick animal.) It is an excellent idea to have stable populations per group room, let the group size diminish as animals are adopted out, and then start an entirely new group periodically. Animals who stay in the shelter for a very short period of time may never make it in to a group housing situation, which is fine. This “all in, all out” method of group management is also used in farm animal husbandry, by the way.

Group size? With cats, 10-12 is a good group size. More than that can be really unmanageable. The shelters I have seen that do cat group housing well have multiple rooms with groups about this size. It can be tempting to have one large room with all your cats in it. I have seen this done as well. It was a disaster, with rampant disease and fighting.

Is group housing a good thing?
I definitely think group housing is a good thing for cats in shelters when done well. But it does have to be done thoughtfully and with planning. It is good for the cats, but it is not a way to save time or money.

I haven’t seen group housing for dogs in a shelter yet. Word on the street is that there is a shelter a few hours from me that does this, and I really want to check it out. I will report back if I do!

Animal shelter surgery: autoligation

When I watched my first video on how to spay a dog, lo these many (two) years ago, I kept saying “what’s a pedicle?” Apparently it was very important to tie the suture around the pedicle very tightly. And from context it was clear that the pedicle was the bit of tissue connecting the ovary to the body wall. But what was it?

I finally figured it out. The pedicle is the bit of tissue connecting the ovary to the body wall. It isn’t really anything in particular, it isn’t any actual anatomical structure, it just holds the ovary in place. But blood vessels run through it, so when you cut it in order to remove the ovary from the animal, lots of bleeding can happen. Bleeding is bad, particularly if it continues after the animal is closed up. So one of the hardest and most important parts of spaying a dog or cat is to make sure that you wrap some suture really, really tightly around the pedicle and tie it in a really, really secure knot so that no blood can get out.

Or not.

In shelter spays, the goal is speed. Most importantly, the less time spent under anesthesia, the better. This is particularly true in the case of feral cat spays, in which the cat can’t receive optimal post-op care because she can’t be handled. Also, of course, shorter spays means you can move more animals through in a day, sometimes dozens of animals per surgeon. We are not keeping up with the cat population with surgical sterilization as it is, so the high volume spay/neuter operations really try to keep as many animals as possible moving through.

One way that shelter vets try to make surgery time shorter is with autoligation. Instead of tying suture around the pedicle before cutting it, the pedicle is actually tied to itself. It’s a lot faster once you learn to do it. There is no futzing with getting the suture around the little cat pedicle with all the big clamps around it (oops! I looped the suture around a clamp! Time to start over). Tie the pedicle to itself, cut, inspect, let it sink back into the abdomen and move on. This is a pedicle tie, also known as autoligation (in other words, ligating the pedicle with itself).

Why don’t all vets do this? I suspect some private practice vets do. However, the technique takes a little learning, so if you’re not doing at least a few spays a week, it’s not really worth the investment. One vet recently told me that his private practice only performed about one spay a month. The rest were done in shelters, and that was fine by them.

And that’s one of the ways in which shelter surgery is different from general surgery.

This post written in celebration of my first unsupervised pedicle tie.

The cat in the tree

The skinny little tree was only about 30 feet tall and growing in the middle of a swamp. Recent flooding had surrounded it with water several feet deep. And yet somehow an orange cat had managed to climb it. He was perched precariously: when I first saw him, he was jammed into the fork of two branches, and his every movement made the little tree bend. I was riding with an animal rescue service, and we had been called out to get the cat out of the tree. It was supposed to be a simple job of using climbing gear to get up the tree; the rescue driver was trained to do jobs like this. But this tree was never going to bear her weight. It could barely hold the cat. Even getting to the tree was going to involve wading through waist-deep water in the chilly November weather.

The cat was glad to see us. He made eye contact and meowed, clearly asking for help. But it was not immediately clear how to help him. We talked about our options, and eventually decided that we were going to have to call back to the shelter for assistance. The rescue driver called her boss, but initially failed to convince him that she couldn’t just climb the tree. She eventually had to photograph the situation on her phone and send him that as proof that the tree couldn’t support a ladder, and that trying would just knock the cat off so that he would fall 30 feet into the cold water.

As we watched and talked about what to do, took photos and made phone calls, the cat eventually stopped talking to us. I think he gave up on us. A few minutes later, he decided to change positions. I think his legs were getting tired of holding him up. After all, we had no idea how long he had been up there; a good samaritan had phoned about him about an hour previously, but the road we were standing on was small and rarely used, so he could have been there unnoticed for hours. I also think he was trying to assess his situation, see if he could take matters into his own hands and find his own way down, since we were clearly useless.

As he moved around on the little tree, it bent terrifyingly. Unable to help ourselves, the rescue driver and I yelled “No, stay still!” up at the cat. This had about as much effect as you’d expect. But he managed not to fall. Over the next thirty minutes, waiting for help to arrive, we watched as he periodically moved around and tried to find a way down. We became worried enough about him that the driver put on her dry-suit and made her way down to the water so that she could fish him out if he fell.

Finally, as the light was failing, our help arrived, in the form of the driver’s boss who had driven down from Boston. Now things started to move quickly. As the cat watched with trepidation, the driver got into the water (in her dry-suit) with a big net; I hovered with another big net; and the driver’s boss attached ropes to the little tree. He pulled, and the tree bent towards the roadway where we stood. The cat braced himself, then, when he was only about ten feet off the ground, jumped. I swung with the net and missed. We watched as the cat ran at top speed away from us down the long road and disappeared into the night.

Volunteering at a trap/neuter/release clinic

This weekend I volunteered at a TNR (trap/neuter/release) clinic. TNR is one way to deal with the feral cat population: volunteer trappers trap the cats and bring them to clinics like this one, where they are vaccinated, spayed or neutered, perhaps given some other basic medical care, and returned to the trappers, who release them. Maintained colonies, provided food by caretakers, can be surprisingly healthy, and this sort of birth control keeps their numbers reasonable and in fact allows them to gradually decrease in size as cats age. If, on the other hand, colonies are destroyed outright, new colonies will move in to take over.

I rotated through all the stations, so I got to see how the entire clinic worked. The first station was anesthesia. The animals arrive in traps, with sheets over them to make things a little less scary for them. Some of them are pets gone feral, but some were born feral and have never interacted with humans. The cats are forced into a corner of their trap, either with a long stick or with a separator pushed through the bars of the trap; truly feral cats are often too scared to move at this point, and therefore can be easier to handle than the moderately tame cats, which may be less scared and more angry. Then a volunteer injects them with sleepy juice. This is an IM (intramuscular) injection, and I had only performed my first IM injection earlier that day, on an anesthetized animal that I could handle at my leisure to find the muscle. Sticking an animal through the bars of a trap, when the animal was liable to suddenly start wriggling around again, was challenging. A tech showed me how to find the muscle and make sure it was not bone (that would hurt!). By the end of this rotation I was able to confidently say I’d found muscle and stick the animal without the tech’s assistance.

Because we can’t interact with the cats while they’re awake, they have to be given somewhat more anesthesia solution than an owned, handleable animal would be, because they have to stay out for the physical exam before the surgery; they also can’t be checked out for heart problems before being given anesthesia which are a warning flag for potential problems. I have heard people ask why owned animals can’t be included in these clinics as a way of expanding low cost spay/neuter services, and the answer is, owned animals are and should be handled differently than ferals. For one thing, you’re moderately sure an owned animal has had its rabies vaccination!

After the cats go under, some after a booster dose to get them there, they are transferred to the physical exam station. It was so relaxing to get to practice a physical exam to an unconscious cat who wasn’t trying to kill me when I looked in his mouth! I checked eyes, nose, mouth, ears, double checked gender, listened to hearts (I heard some arrhythmias, but only ones which were normal for the anesthesia solution that was being used), and checked breathing rates. I also did a full body check for wounds. Cats coming in with wounds can’t be released because of the risk of rabies. They can be isolated, or they can be euthanized. I did find one cat with obvious bite wounds, but his trapper was able to promise to isolate him for the required period. We also noted the physical condition of each cat, which varied considerably; some were well fed and shiny, others dirty, skinny, and matted. The cats are weighed, and the number of their trap is written on the inside of one ear, so that they can be put back in it later.

After the exam, cats move to pre-op, where the relevant bits are shaved and exhustively cleaned. Shaving testicles is a tricky thing! They were given a booster dose of sleepy juice here and sent off to surgery. Some cats were getting light (starting to wake up) at this point, so the booster was sometimes very necessary.

In surgery, I watched a spay and a neuter. You wouldn’t expect female cats to be pregnant at this time of the year, but it is the policy of almost all TNR clinics to spay even pregnant females. In addition to the spay or neuter, cats have the tip of one ear removed. This provides a visual indication of the fact that they don’t need to be trapped again. All the surgeons were volunteer veterinarians and veterinary students; they seemed to be mostly people who wanted some extra surgical experience.

At the post-surgery station, cats are given vaccinations and pain meds, and then the reversal agent to wake them up. The reversal is given last, as it can take effect quickly. The cats are returned to their original trap and taken to the recovery area, where they are watched by volunteers as they wake up. One cat had trouble regulating her body temperature and had to be taken back out of her trap and placed on a heating pad for a while.

As we were cleaning up at the end of the clinic, I asked the animal control officer who had brought in a lot of the cats if she was seeing a difference in her community. She replied yes — she’d received only three calls for kittens last year, as opposed to thirty in some previous years.

It was a tiring day, but a good one. The clinics happen about once a month, and I’m intending to attend some more, for good hands-on clinical experience during a year when I’m otherwise very research-oriented. This kind of work might also be a good way to not forget all my clinical learning during years spent earing a PhD, if that does turn out to be my next step.