patches and spotty jr

HAVE BEEN ADOPTED! Thank you all for the support.

In fact, their adoption is timely. Aswat, Andy and I have spotted a litter of kittens on the verge of illness and possibly abuse by children. This means we have the space and resource to help them if needed. More on these kittens soon.

Daddy Cat!

Ever since Daddy cat has been neutered, the couple still hangs out together, although we still seldom see him as he is not as sociable as Mommy cat.

We do however have a feeding station outside our flat, mainly for Mommy Cat, which Daddy cat sometimes comes over stealthily to eat and drink of too.

Usually, he is so scared that he will never dare eat when our door is open.

However, he has become a bit less scaredy-cat after his sterilisation. He came to our house to eat once, and did not run away when we opened the door!

Here is a pic of him, and all of us watching him...



Mommy cat is waiting for Daddy cat to finish eating before she partakes of her share.

appeal

I received an email from a fellow cat-lover who is helping to feed the cats in the Aljunied area.

The main cat-feeder in the area is having financial problems feeding herself, let alone the 100 over cats in that area. Hence, she has appealed for help.


Please Help Auntie Siew Fong, the Aljunied MRT Cat Lady

Auntie Siew Fong is the caregiver of over 100 cats in the areas around her home in Circuit Road and outside Aljunied MRT.

She has been unemployed for many months and is only currently starting work as a cleaner with very meagre pay. Given her frail health, she may not be able to sustain in her new job. Many of her past sponsors for cat food has dropped out due to the recent financial crisis, she gets by with borrowing money from friends and asking for donations from well wishers.The cost of cat food can amount up to more than $1,000 a month.

Auntie Siew Fong is desperately in need of help right now. She has totally depleted her funds and don't even have the money for day to day expenses and paying the rent.

She feeds the cats outside Aljunied MRT late every night. If you would like to meet up with her and find out more about her situation, you can call her at 98482575. She speaks Chinese, Cantonese and Malay.

She urgently needs help with:
- sponsorship of dried and canned cat food
- sponsorship or assistance with catching and neutering cats
- sponsorship of medical fees for injured or sick cats
- adoption and rehoming of kittens
- financial assistance for her personal daily expenses
- job referrals as a part-time cleaner (she can do part time cleaning work in areas near her home at Circuit Road e.g. Aljunied, Geylang, Eunos, Paya Lebar, Bedok)

If you would like to sponsor Auntie Siew Fong's cat food purchases, please contact Marcus at Polypet - Tel: 9693 8355.

If you would like to make a donation to Auntie Siew Fong's personal expenses, urgent cat food purchases and medical expenses for sick and injured cats, please transfer the money to her POSB Savings account: 008-43261-9.

Please leave a message on my (York Hwee's) facebook page if you have made a donation towards Auntie Siew Fong or if you have sponsored any of the above mentioned items so that everybody is kept posted on the latest developments. I will also be uploading the latest cat food bills and bank transfer statements to Auntie Siew Fong and Polypets from me for everyone to see.

Please kindly forward this appeal to your friends if you think they might be interested to help.

If you have a blog, web page, facebook, myspace or any other web presence, please kindly help by putting up this appeal on your sites as well.

A big Thank You from Auntie Siew Fong and the 100 over cats under her care.

Lots of love,
York Hwee

sterilise at 6 months old

I have written before about sterilising your pet cats. To read answers to commonly asked questions about cat sterilisation, read our FAQs on sterilisation.

Cats should be sterilised while they are kittens at about 6 months old. This is the time they sexually mature. Some breeds such as Siamese cats take up to 18 months old. Some pedigree owners also choose to delay sterilisation of their cats because they want their cats to reach full physical maturity for showing. These cats are however usually caged up hence their antisocial behaviour is kept to a small space.

But otherwise, please sterilise your cats at 6 months old. For the cat's well-being as well as your own.

For female cats, after sterilisation, they recover in about 24 - 48 hours after the sedative wears off. They are given antibiotics at the vet's so there is no need to clean their stitches. All that is needed is to prevent your cat from licking her wound, and from jumping about too much, for about 10 days. The stitches used are dissolving sutures, which means that there is no need to remove the stitches when the incision has healed. You should receive a certificate for her sterilisation, also known as spaying, and you can also opt to tip her ear or get a tattoo on it. Do not bathe your cat until the stitches are healed, and if you need to treat her with flea-treatment such as Frontline, wait till about 3 weeks after the surgery.

For male cats, stitches may not even be required as the incision is very small. The male cat should return to normal within the day he comes home from the surgery.

Both procedures are outpatient, and your cat does not need to stay overnight at the clinic.

In terms of behavioural changes, your female cat should be the same as before. She will not call out during estrus i.e. when 'in heat' as she will no longer have the biological urge to mate and reproduce. This mating call is loud, continuous and often goes on throughout the night while she is awake. It is definitely audible by neighbours. It will take place every 3 weeks for an unsterilised female, until she is pregnant. But this mating call will cease after sterilisation. Apart from peace and quiet, male cats will not be found loitering about your house and spraying thick, smelly urine because of the attraction calls made by a queen on heat.

For male cats, they will no longer spray sticky urine around their territory, i.e. your house, and they will also be unlikely to want to run away by jumping through open windows of your flat or whenever the opportunity strikes when you open the door.

Likewise, you will know when is the right time to sterilise your cat whenever they display their 'in-heat' behaviour as listed above. For more FAQs on sterilisation, please go to SPCA's sterilise page.

The procedure for sterilisation costs about $80 for a male cat, and $100-$120 for a female cat, more if she is on heat as the uterus and other reproductive organs will be swollen and the cat is likely to bleed more. She also may already be pregnant if she was brought in for sterilisation too late, and additional costs incur for abortion.

There are schemes for neutering stray cats, which can go as low as $50 per male cat. Our immediate Ubi neighbourhood's strays have their sterilisation funded by kind cat patrons such as Auntie Can.

You can start a neighbourhood sterilisation programme for your own estate. There are a few ways to go about it. The first way is via Cat Welfare Society. In this case, because their volunteers need time to respond, you need to trap the cats early, and allow for a lag time for response after contacting them. You can also make an appointment for sterilising the cats at SPCA itself, on selected days. After arranging for an appointment, you can transport the trapped cats to the SPCA clinic.

If you would like to manage the sterilisation procedure just among your community, you will need to find a way to fund the process, and you can then contact a full-service provider - someone who helps to trap, transport the cats to the clinic, collect and return the cats to your neighbourhood. This process is more time-efficient, the only obstacle is that the costs need to be borne by your own community. As such, it would be good to band together amongst the cat-lovers in your neighbourhood to carry out such programmes in your own neighbourhood.

Neighbourhood sterilisation is important because of a few reasons. Firstly, sterilised cats when returned to their territories actually reduce the cat population. These sterilised cats fight away unsterilised cats that roam into their territory. They will also be unable to reproduce. Hence the stray cat population is reduced. Secondly, the noise that comes from cats, the kind that concerned neighbours are likely to complain about, comes from cats that are on heat. The female cat calls out, the males also meow loudly when they have to fight another male to mate with their selected female cat. This happens in the middle of the night. Thirdly, the male cats no longer have the urge to urinate on shop-fronts, outside neighbours' doors, and other public territories. As male tom cats' urine is extremely smelly and hard to wash off, this problem when solved restores the goodwill of your neighbouring shop owners. As unsterilised animals cause all these problems, complaints from neighbours and shop owners may result in the authorities resorting to pest-control measures, that is, to trap the cats to kill. Please do not let such matters escalate to such a stage as it is unnecessary for lives to be lost.

It is all not just about the cats' welfare; it is about your own - your family, your neighbours. Because of this, it is not unwise to plan sterilisation for your own cats, and for your neighbourhood's if you can. It is a one-time cost which is well worth it.

patches and spotty jr.

Some time ago, a family in Ubi dumped their pedigree cat onto the neighbourhood, making her a stray cat. She is a chocolate Burmese cat, and she produced a daughter, a chocolate tortoiseshell cat who roams the blocks not far from her.

This tortoiseshell cat recently gave birth to 2 kittens. We chanced upon them one night when we were feeding the strays in the neighbourhood because Auntie Can was unable to make it that night for her usual feeding routine.

We realised that the tortoiseshell cat must have given birth outside one first-storey flat, which is situated just next to the car park. At first, we thought that the family owns the tortoiseshell cat with her 2 kittens, but after monitoring them for a few days, we realised that they are in fact strays. The family on the first floor had placed a water and food bowl for these strays.

However, the danger was that the kittens were constantly roaming about in the adjacent carpark, and being young, they had no notion of danger which could come from passing traffic.

Which is why, after monitoring them, Aswat decided to rescue these kittens to prevent any traffic accidents or illness in the kittens. They are now boarding at Angels Pet Shop.

One of the kittens is a chocolate torbie we call Patches. She has the most adorable fur, like a teddy bear, and is very agreeable in temperament. Her fur is thick, which makes her fluffy face really snuggable.




Her sister looks just like Spotty from the neighbourhood! Her fur is thick just like her sister, the only variance being that her colouring is totally unlike a Burmese cat, being white and black. We like white and black! Slinky and Sayang are of the same colouring and we love the way the white is so soft and the black so shiny. Mini Spotty is extremely active and strong-willed, which is particular of Burmese genes.





Both cats are healthy and are about 6 weeks old now. They need very little grooming as their fur, while thick, is short, like their grandmother's and mother's. They have been boarding at Angel's for a while now, eating Royal Canin Kitten 36, and Bistro canned food. They have also been toilet trained.

If you would like to view and adopt these second generation cross-Burmese kittens, do contact us. A small token would be appreciated for Aswat who has been feeding and cleaning up after them.

please sterilise

Please sterilise your pet cats at 6 months old. The only exception to the rule is that if your cat is a Siamese cat which may only sexually mature at a later age.

If you wait any longer, you have to deal with the consequences of unwanted pregnancies, sexual health problems, anti-social behaviours such as running away or urinating around the house. Mating, pregnancy or childbirth does not make a cat's life more meaningful in any way.

One of the kids in the neighbourhood, Ashraf, who is a proud owner of both pedigree and local cats, recently had 2 of his cats brought to the doctor for sterilisation.

The cats were already both pregnant, because the sterilisation was planned too late, and Ashraf's mother decided against terminating both cats' pregnancies. Hence both cats carried their litters to full term.

The result of which is 2 litters of kittens, the first of whom we saw yesterday. This first litter of kittens are about 4 to 6 weeks old, 2 of them are black and white, the other 2 are tabby and white.

Because the pregnancies are unplanned and Ashraf's cat family is already complete, the kittens will need to be re-homed.




The cats are very active, and have already begun to eat solid food. They have round eyes, and thick fur, and full-length tails. There are 2 boys and 2 girls. Contact us if you would like to provide an unwanted kitten a new home.

chicken!

Today I cooked the most awesome batch of homemade cat food.

Using half a chicken, skinned, I simmered it in some apple and cranberry juice, with a dash of rosemary leaves, over a slow fire. I then removed the meat from the bones and poured the resulting broth into the meat, stirring in one egg. When the meat cooled I placed it in the fridge.

The cooling process turned the broth into jelly because of the chicken fats, and the meat is superbly flavoured. I tried it myself when it was just cooked, it was delicious.

The cats love it. Yes, even Sayang.

Compared to chicken breast alone, the meat is extremely rich in protein because of the thigh, drumstick, wing parts (muscle meat contains more protein). The only trouble was removing the skin before cooking and the meat after. But it was worth the effort seeing them enjoy good food.

After their dinner both Sayang and Scooter were hyperactively playing about, they had so much energy to burn, thanks to the protein. I had to give both of them supper and they loved the repeat serving of the chicken served with their kibbles. Oh, and also they hungrily lapped up the milk I put alongside their suppers. And so did Slinky, but she had no supper since she didn't exercise.

update on Sammy

Sammy has been successfully adopted by Ili and her family in Tampines. Her entire family has fallen in love with the kitten and has renamed him Mika. Thank you Ili for giving Mika a new home!

Sayang the art critic

Our cat tree has been more heavily used lately since we have been fostering Sammy. Often I find one or two cats snoozing on the tree. Sayang has also taken to going to the top tier of the cat condo so she can have some personal time to herself.

She also seems to enjoy the paint sketches of mine hung on the wall.

In fact, she sat there and stared at them for very, very long...

shitty

Sammy is a great cat to keep: he is easy-going, even-tempered, not picky with food, not overly attention-seeking. He however has one weird habit - he seems to think that cloth surfaces = extra litter box. So far he has tried to pee once on a floor mat, successfully pooed on it as well, and he has shat on my sofa and cushion. And he still has watery stools, so cleaning up after him has been... fun. That is if you enjoy Dettol and cleaning detergents in a weird way. I hope the anti-diarrhoea medicine works (I got my stash of it back from Aswat) or else I really will go obsessive-compulsively cleaning every day. Luckily most of his business is still done in the litter box. It seems to be true they say, that kittens can be litter trained from 6 weeks of age - Sammy should be about 6 weeks old now.