Slowly, one by one, that cats began to eat. They wouldn’t do it in front of their human caretakers but we were so happy each morning to pull back the sheets from their cages and see empty food bowls with most of them. We kept logs of everyone’s daily activities whether they ate or drank, used their litter boxes and how they reacted to being touched by our “magic wand”. We soon discovered that we had 5 babies that would allow us to physically touch them and we worked up to holding the few that would let us. We had 9 kittens that needed bottlefeeding and had a wonderful volunteer who stepped up to care for them and we were able to get the 5 that would let us hold them into foster care for further socialization.
It’s difficult to know in this situation what is the best thing to do with feral cats for the sake of them and the environment that they could potentially be released into. It would be irresponsible of us to arbitrarily release them without carefully considering the impact that they would have on other animals and without knowing what their needs were. As hard as it is to do, we chose to have necropsies (the equivalent of an autopsy in humans) conducted on several of the cats that we had to euthanize in order to understand the diseases that they were harboring and how that would affect the rest of the colony.
There was great concern that we would have to “depopulate” which is the polite term for having to euthanize everyone in order to prevent disease spread. This is something that we have never done and never want to do. We waited for two days on pins and needles for the results. Upon receiving the results we consulted with the former Director of Shelter Medicine from Cornell University and her counterpart at the University of Florida. These are the preeminent veterinarians in this field and we were so lucky to find the right connections to lead us to them. A wave of relief came over us when they were both of the same opinion — since all of the cats in the population were negative for Felv and FIV, the cats posed no greater risk to other animals that they will come into contact with than those animals are already exposed to and that if they are showing no clinical signs of disease they would be ok to release.
To this point we had been in a holding pattern with these babies, now it was time for the next big step.
