CAT-ALOGUE OF
Meet the team who look after and rehome Perthshire’s unwanted felines
Kittens are often brought into the Cats Protection Fiona Morrison with Felix It takes a whopping £5000 for cat food and £15,000 in vet bills a year to give around 200 cats in Perthshire their‘forever home’.
It’s all in a year’s work for the Perth branch of the Cats Protection.
With the region’s cat lovers celebrating international cat day last week, the PA met up with Corinne Kidd, branch coordinator, and Fiona Morrison, secretary and cat fosterer, to see behind-the-scenes at the Cats Protection.
The charity picks up unwanted, abandoned and feral cats from all over the region, and works to get them rehomed with loving families.
Fiona Morrison explained: “The cats we have come from a variety of places.
“People hand them over to us for numerous reasons – you name it, we have heard it.
“Some people hand one in because they are moving house, or because they have had a baby. We also get calls from people saying a mum with kittens has turned up– earlier this week we went out to Crieff to pick up kittens.
“The mum was domesticated so the woman who found them has already taken her in, and we set humane traps with smelly bait like tuna for the kittens.
“We never know what each day is going to bring.”
However, there’s more to rehoming a cat than just finding a new owner.
The volunteers at the Cats Protection have to neuter, microchip, vaccinate and de-worm and de-flea each cat they find.
This includes stray cats, even if they end up never rehoming them and releasing them back to the land they were found on.
Corrine explained: “Cats Protection neuters hundreds of thousands of cats, and the costs are irrelevant because that is the whole ethos, to stop the spread of unwanted cats.
“We never euthanase cats, we only neuter them to keep numbers down.
“Our biggest colony we are looking after at the moment is at Ballathie. The cats are not rehomable so we will have them treated by the vets and hand them back to the colony.
“We get a lot of calls from people reporting a lot of cats who become a colony because they can be pregnant and give birth in nine weeks.
“If that is continuous they could have three litters in a summer season, so the colony can multiply quickly.”
However, the volunteers luckily do not see a lot of abuse and neglect in Perth and Kinross.
Fiona said: “We are quite lucky in this area – it is a good area in that we are not inner city and not seeing the same amount of abuse, but it does happen.
“We see more numbers spiralling out of control, where someone has thought it is okay to have 10 cats and sadly with inbreeding 10 becomes 30.
“We have been called to that situation before, and an example I am thinking of is where we came home with three baskets of kittens and we completely lost count of how many there were.
“That is a neglect issue, but not deliberate. People just don’t realise how quickly it can get out of control.