Fostering with Cats Protection.

Hello! 

It's no secret I work for the Cats Protection as a Cat Carer, a job I truly get pleasure from helping and rehoming unwanted cats and kittens. A great way we have people helping us due to our high waiting list for our 150+ kennels is to foster! We have a mum and her kittens go out to one of our foster carer volunteers who look after them and follow our weaning and socialization program until the babies and mum are ready to come back and find their forever homes.

A few experienced fosters and staff often foster cats and kittens who are having a hard time in their kennels or kittens who were born outside (feral) and are still able to be socialized. This is what I did!

Meet Spirit:

Spirit on his first day in my house. Terrified!

Spirit came into our care at 10 weeks old, he was found trapped in a garden fence and found by a dog. The people who managed to untangle him and get him inside said he was hissing and terrified. Just as they were about to bring him into us he managed to escape his box and run full pelt into a glass door splitting his lip right upto his nose and cutting all the inside of his mouth. We took him to the vets and treated him accordingly for two weeks before he was well enough to be put up for homing. 

In his homing kennel Spirit would hide out of view and hiss whenever you put him in his kennel. I had just signed up to foster cats exactly like this so they could live in my spare bedroom and I could socialise them and keep them in a quiet space before they were ready to return to the center. With kittens it usually takes 2 weeks to get them to come around to human affection. 

My manager asked me to foster Spirit and get him ready to be rehomed and I was so excited! 

I took him home after my shift and left him settle in a small pen for the night, he was so scared but alot better than he had been in his kennel. The first night I managed to get a few stroked in and by the second night he was playing with his toys freely.

After one week looking after Spirit and helping him grow in confidence, he loved snuggled and would sleep on me for hours and hours. It's safe to say he adopted me! 

Unfortunately I became a failed fosterer and put the motions in to adopt Spirit as my own!

In even worse news the day before I signed my paperwork I noticed some patches of skin that looked off with Spirits face and working with sick cats I knew this was bad news. Reluctantly I knew I had to tell my managers and they were going to hold off the adoption and bring him back into our Isolation unit for tests and treatment. I was a wreck! I cried all the time at work and at home and after 2 weeks of him being back at the center I got the bad news he had tested positive for a highly contagious skin disease - Ringworm. 

I had to bleach the room he stayed in and get rid of any soft furnishings he touched. Luckily I didn't catch anything and Prince never met him so he was safe too.

It's been 6 weeks now and I've just got his first negative last week, so he needs one more which hopefully means in 3 more weeks he will be back home with me! He's 5 months old now and SO much bigger (even his fur colour has changed!) but I get to see him every day and even work with him in Isolation. I'm still going ahead with the adoption and taking a HUGE break from fostering as it's too tempting to keep them! :p

Spirit in Isolation. 

Spirit is such a loving cat and I really cannot wait to have him home - so expect more cat picture spam!

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