Down on the Farm

People tend to make comments about my house full of cats pretty often. Sometimes I have mixed feelings about these comments, when I find myself wondering "Should I be happy that he just said that? Or does that mean that I'm really a crazy old cat lady?"

For example, this past October I made the rounds of Petsmart and Petco for their annual Halloween Costume Contests. I dressed up the cats, and my rabbit. At Petsmart, the cats as a group won 3rd place (don't laugh - you win money for this stuff!). At Petco, my rabbit, dressed as a scarecrow won 3rd place. However, while the rabbit was a winner at Petco, the cats got their own special prize. At the end of the contest, the manager of Petco stood up and started talking about wonderful people who do animal rescue. He was talking about cats, and since there was a kitten adoption event going on in the store, I didn't think much about his speech. I just thought he was talking about the adoption event. Then at the end of his speech he said something along the lines of "And today we have 2 people here who have started their own rescue in their house, and we are thankful every day for people like them." He was talking about us. During the contest we had to show everyone our animals and talk about them a little. So of course we were introducing cats by saying "This is Wendy. She was living in a dumpster when we found her." "This is Patches. She was living in a bush begging for food at a restaurant that we stopped at." And so on... So the "prize"? We were given 6 large coupon books full of items for cats. They are the same coupon books that you would be given if you were to adopt a cat at Petco. In the books were several coupons for free food, which we can ALWAYS use! He also gave us a bag full of food samples. We were VERY greatful for all of this but we were also slightly in shock. Both Mr. V and I were thinking "He just called us a rescue. Is that a good thing? Or are we crazy?"

Fast forward to this past Friday. One "fun" thing about having a lot of cats is dealing with them when there is a medical issue. Sometimes its hard to figure out which cat is sick. Sometimes when we do find a cat with something wrong with it, it means the the other 8 also have the same thing wrong with them. So about 2 weeks ago I took my cat Wendy to the vet for a dental cleaning. She had minor dental disease and I have been told for several years that she needs a professional dental cleaning. I kept avoiding it because cats need to be under anesthesia for dental work, which is expensive. February was Dental Month at Best Friends Veterinary Hospital, with 10% off so I finally caved and took Wendy in. $500 later, she had clean teeth and updated shots (some of that money went to some extra monitoring that I opted for while she was under anesthesia ). They also ran some lab tests on her, did a "fun" stool sample and found out that she has coccidia. Coccidia is a wonderful, fun parasite that is one of the harder parasites to get rid of. So of course, I asked the vet if my other 8 cats would also have coccidia. The answer? "Not neccessarily, but its very likely." Wonderful!

I went home and debated back and forth with Mr. V about what to do about our possible coccidia outbreak. In the midst of debating whether or not we should drop a few thousand dollars on ALL of the cats at once, another one of the cats, Moses, started scooting his butt across the floor. Wonderful. While that action is funny to watch, its also really disgusting. It usually means one of 3 things. 1 - he's cleaning his butt after using the litter box (absolutely gross, but this would have been the best answer), 2 - he has anal glands that need to be drained, and for anyone who knows about this procedure, its something that can be done at home, but it is worth any amount of money in the world to have a vet do it for you, or 3 - he has worms/parasites. Since Wendy was just diagnosed with coccidia, it meant that Moses was off to the vet too!

After a pretty thorough checkup, it was decided that Moses also has coccidia. I asked the vet again about the chance of the others (now 7) having coccidia. I got the same answer. "Not necessarily, but its very likely." Wonderful! This was a different vet from the same animal hospital.

I asked her what I needed to do about this. Do I really need to bring every single cat in for an exam? I think she saw the horror and panic in my face as I calculated what this was going to cost me, so thankfully she helped me out. She told me that by law, a vet can't prescribe medicine to an animal, unless that animal is a patient. The law states that there has to be a doctor/patient relationship. Awesome. HOWEVER, there is a loophole in this law :-). When a vet goes to a farm and one animal is being treated for parasites, then ALL of the animals will be treated, regardless of if they have been seen by that vet. So after talking to her boss, the vet who owns the hospital, she pretty much classified me as a farm, gave me enough medicine for all of the cats, and I got out of there with a $300 bill, instead of a $2000 bill.

So now we have been recognized as a rescue AND a farm. Which really makes me wonder? Am I really a crazy old cat lady? Is this a positive thing that people are classifying my house as these things? I guess I should be thankful that my animals area all healthy (minus a coccidia outbreak) and no one is classifying me as a hoarder. Since a hoarder typically has more animals than they can care for and those animals are showing very noticable signs of being unhealthy, I guess I should be thankful that people notice that we do take care of the cats here. There may be 9 of them, but they are all loved, although you wouldn't know that right now. Apparently coccidia medicine is quite horrifying to them, so after their last dose today, maybe they will come out of hiding and love me again :-).