Is this a litter pan or my very own race car? Beep, Beep!

Everyone loved Winston’s new carrier, which is really an older model from the 80’s. This “stylin’ ride” comes complete with roller wheels that allow us to push Winston wherever he needs to go. And since he is a big boy, this keeps us from throwing out our backs when we try to lift him.

This carrier is actually perfect for Winston, who when he peers out of it, looks as if he is driving his own space ship or litter pan shaped race car. We have Brian to thank for this ultra cool set of wheels. He had it tucked away in storage from the days when his former cat used it and he kindly passed it on to us before he acquired Albert. Although we offered to return it so Albert could have a hip carrier, Brian thought it was more suited for Winston.

And we agree. Although, we are not sure what Winston thinks of the whole experience.

Care to cruise in my hot rod?

I am absolutely thrilled about this! Thanks in large part to Ellen DeGeneres and Halo, Purely for Pets, a company that she co-owns, the Postal Service is producing a series of stamps encouraging people to adopt a shelter or rescue animal. The stamp series is called “Animal Rescue: Adopt a Shelter Pet,” and will be the post office’s 2010 social awareness stamp set. Along with DeGeneres and Halo, the Postal Service is promoting this campaign called “Stamps to the Rescue.”

The stamps, which feature five dogs and five cats, all of which were adopted from a shelter in New Milford, Connecticut, can be pre-ordered today at the Stamps to the Rescue web site, at usps.com/shop, or by calling 1-800-STAMP24 (1-800-782-6724).

In addition, Halo will be donating a million meals to animal shelters around the country to give these often forgotten animals a “First Class meal.”

Please check out the Stamps to the Rescue site. The very cool web site has information about each of the animals featured on the stamps (all who found wonderful homes) and explains why adoption is so important to end the euthanasia of millions of healthy shelter animals each year. While you are on the site, you can even print out an adoption certificate to commemorate the addition of a new companion to your family. There is even a link from the site to Petfinder to make finding your future companion even easier.

In the past the Postal Service has taken on other social issues such as children’s health, Alzheimer’s, breast cancer awareness, organ and tissue donation, literacy, and philanthropy. They also featured stamps with a puppy and a kitten on them in 2002 to promote “Neuter or Spay.” With this large campaign in place, Ellen, Halo, and the Postal Service will surely educate more people on the need to adopt, stamping out the deaths of thousands of worthy and lovable cats and dogs.

Lucas, an orange tabby, was cold and hungry before he made his way to a shelter. Lucky for him, he got great vet care and a new home!

 Chami and her companion, Cody, need a home after their human mom passed away.

Chami, a female cream colored Persian, is willing to take afternoon naps in a pool of sunlight. She doesn’t care much about chasing mice any more or indulging in catnip highs. She doesn’t mind a human mom or dad who are home and underfoot. She’ll guard the bed and keep intruders off the pillows. She’s even up to spending her retirement days lounging on the patio watching the birds or tooling around in an R.V., as long as she’s with someone who loves her.

Cody agrees. His only request is for ample shut eye and quiet time. Other than that, Cody and Chami won’t ask for much.

Cody, who is a silver male Persian, has been with Chami for most of his fifteen years. This distinguished, elderly couple would love to spend the rest of their lives side by side.

That is where you enter their story.

Unfortunately, these senior felines are looking for a new home this late in their lives because their human mom died. The other family members did not want Chami and Cody and took them to their local vet clinic to be euthanized. With death just around the corner, Renee Kelly, founder of The Forgotten Persian Rescue and Friends, whisked the two away to Noah’s Ark Vet Hospital and saved their lives. 

Whew…that was close.

Now the two just need a home where they can spend their final years. Both cats are fifteen and Renee realizes that people may balk at adopting cats that are elderly. However, a home is just what they need, because senior cats do not do well in clinic or shelter settings with stress and daily changes. 

Because she knows there may be concerns about vet care for two older kitties, Renee has also made a very, very generous offer. For the person who adopts this elegant pair, Noah’s Ark will provide medical care for the rest of the cats’ lives at no charge to the adopter. That’s right. Free vet care for the remainder of Chami and Cody’s lives. 

If you are interested in a gentle geriatric pair of kitties, please contact Noah’s Ark Vet Hospital at 614-761-8400 and ask to speak with Renee. She will get the adoption process started. Noah’s Ark is located at 6001 Memorial Drive in Muirfield Village in Dublin.

And remember, Chami and Cody both promise to soak up any stray beams of sunlight and leave warm spots on your sofa cushions! But hey, that’s their job now that they’re retired.

Simon is now safe and relaxing in foster care.

Everyone always tells me horror stories about animals; stories I don’t want to hear and that sometimes keep me awake at night worrying about stranded and abused cats and dogs.

But the story of Simon is one I had to hear and one I want to tell you even though it is difficult to know that things like this occur. The focus of this story is on the positive–one person stepped forward and saved one cat, Simon. And, although he is the lone survivor, we can rejoice in his life.

Here is Simon’s story.

Toward the end of January, I had an email from the Madison County Dog Warden, Gary Kronk. The email said that he needed help for a lady in a local trailer park and her 13 inside cats. The lady was going in a nursing home because of Alzheimer’s and there was no one to take care of the cats. Deputy Kronk needed a place for the cats to go and quickly. He was working with the attorney who was in charge of the lady’s case and she wanted the cats out of the trailer pronto.

Deputy Kronk tried to accommodate the lawyer, but she wanted a solution that day–something he could not do. The lawyer talked about hiring a “nuisance company” to come in and “take care” of the cats, something Deputy Kronk did not want to happen. He wanted to find them a home, even though they were not adoptable in the normal sense of the word.

Most of the cats were very shy. They had only been around the older woman and were not socialized to the point where they could be adopted. To most people they would have appeared to be feral. But, unlike most feral cats, they also had never been outside. They had always lived in a warm, safe environment. Therefore, they needed a barn home where they would be protected from the cold and conditions they had no experience with.

As you well remember, at the end of January into February, Ohio was hit with a ton of snow. Even animals used to living outside were having a hard time. Inside only cats certainly could not manage those extremities.

I could offer no solutions to Deputy Kronk. We had been looking for barn homes for several of our kitties with no luck. He was checking to see if there was any money in the woman’s estate to take care of the cats. We thought maybe we could, at least, get them fixed before they went anywhere else.

But we, and, sadly, the cats ran out of time.

Deputy Kronk had such a hard time working on this case that he finally pulled out because he was having problems trying to offer solutions that did not mean death to the cats.

But death is what they got.

Just about a week ago, one of our Board members, Carol, had a phone call from a vet office here in Plain City wondering if we could help with a Siamese kitty that came from a rotten situation. When Carol began describing the circumstances to me, I knew it was the same case Deputy Kronk had been working on with no success.

The Siamese cat, Carol told me, had come from a trailer after his human had to go to a nursing home. Carol had further details in the saga. It seems that the people in charge of the cats decided to just let them all outside as their way of solving the problem. When one of the neighbors saw beautiful, friendly Simon out in the cold, wading through the snow, he scooped him up and took him inside. The other cats were not so lucky. None survived the weather.

We, of course, offered to get vet care for Simon and help find him a home. It turned out that Simon was already ear-tipped and neutered, so possibly all of the cats had already been vetted and huge expenses used for their vet care–all for nothing.

After I took Simon to the vet, I spoke with the lady who was taking care of him and she gave me further gruesome details in Simon’s story.

It seems that the people went into the trailer, shooing out all the cats that would leave (and really, how many would have opted to run out into the cold and snow, vacating their warm home?). Those that did not go were locked inside to starve. After a few weeks, the people came back and removed the dead bodies.

I cried when I heard this. What a needless waste of life. What an awful way to die. The kinder choice would have been to humanely euthanize them, not allow them to suffer without food and water, wallowing in their own feces, among their dying feline friends.

I could only think of my own cats and fosters. Many of them are very shy. If you opened my front door, not many would run outside. They would, instead, hide from strangers. Under the same circumstances, my cats would also have been locked inside and starved to death.

And what would the poor woman with Alzheimer’s think if she knew the fate of her beloved cats? They were her only companions, their fuzzy faces the one constant in her life. She would not have wanted them to die or to suffer.

Conditions in the trailer after the woman left must have been bad, because poor Simon’s feet were encrusted with feces and cat litter after his rescue. His current protector told me that she started noticing bloody paw prints on her carpet from Simon’s raw feet. Simon, in his attempts to remove the hardened clumps on his pads, pulled away skin, as well.

Thankfully, Simon’s feet have now almost completely healed. He is also very, very thin. But he still loves people, still wants you to pet and hold him. He still trusts that humans will do the best they can for him. Because that is the way with animals. They always forgive.

Simon is a survivor. I only wish I had done more to produce that same fate for the others. I feel terribly guilty that I didn’t get more involved. I am working with Deputy Kronk to see if there are any charges that can be brought against the people who killed the cats. It is too little, too late, but I feel I must do something.

Someday, I hope to never again hear another animal horror story. And the only way to do that is to stop the people who cause these atrocities. I am positive that can happen.

Poor Naomi needs to be pain free so she can smile again!

Naomi, who was formerly called P. L. G. (which stands for Poor Little Girl), came to us after she was abandoned in a trailer when her family moved. The Madison County dog warden (our buddy Gary) found Naomi without food or water living alone in the trailer. He had the trailer park manager contact our volunteers, the Swider family, who live in the area and have trapped most of the cats in the park for our TNR projects. They kindly offered to foster Naomi until we could find her a home.

But this was not a simple case of getting the cat fixed and putting her up for adoption. Poor Naomi had some issues with her mouth that we soon realized were very, very serious. In fact, she had so many lesions and sore spots on her gums that sometimes she had trouble eating and would scream (yes, literally scream) in pain. 

Dr. West at Noah’s Ark offered to help Naomi, but after weeks of antibiotics and pain medicine, we discovered that Naomi actually had a hole in the roof of her mouth. Dr. West suspected that the poor cat may have chewed on an electrical cord, shocking herself and causing the damage with an electrical burn. 

Just this week, Naomi went to see a feline dental specialist because Dr. West felt her problems were extremely complicated. Naomi has two main issues that are making her mouth hurt and causing her to stop eating. First of all, she has the lesions and hole in the roof of her mouth. Secondly, the poor cat has stomatitis, which causes her throat and gums to be inflamed due to an immune related condition.

The stomatitis required that Naomi have a full mouth extraction of all her teeth, which she had done yesterday. With steroid injections and her teeth pulled, the inflammation should be relieved. Once her mouth has healed from the removal of her teeth, Naomi will then need a second operation to close the hole in the roof of her mouth.

And this is why we need your help. The first surgery to remove Naomi’s teeth is estimated to cost $1500-1600 (we haven’t received the bill yet–we are holding our breath waiting for that). But the $1500-1600 is not even taking into consideration what the second surgery will cost.

Even the dental surgeon has told us over and over, “She is such a nice cat.” And she is. She truly deserves to have her mouth fixed and be able to get a home where she will never, ever be left behind again. 

We can only wonder what would have happened to Naomi if we had not agreed to help her. Unable to eat, with no family, and in horrible pain, she probably would have curled up somewhere and died. And it would not have been a slow and easy death, but a prolonged death by starvation made excruciating due to her mouth pain.

Happily, this girl is getting a second chance. And we just need your help to make our toothless girl smile a gummy smile again. If you can make a donation toward Naomi’s surgeries, we can soon bring a kitty smile back to her furry face. 

You can make a donation online through our Paypal account on our home page: www.bandocats.org

You can also mail a donation to Black and Orange Cat Foundation, P. O. Box 126, Plain City, Ohio 43064 or you can drop any donations off at Plain City Druggist, 480 South Jefferson Avenue in Plain City (across from Der Dutchman Restaurant). The Spay Neuter Clinic located at 2752 Sawbury Blvd off of Sawmill Road also has a donation box for us.

We cannot help Naomi and all the other kitties like her, cats that other organizations might not deem worth saving, without YOU!

We promised Naomi that soon she'll be eating all she wants without any pain! Bring on the kibble and tuna!

Albert is feline leukemia positive and needs a loving home where he can hang out.

Albert came to us at the beginning of February when we were all buried under mountains of snow. A lady we have helped with kitties in the past wrote with a desperate email about a little scraggly cat who was scrounging for food. She was worried about him being out in the cold and snow, because she thought he looked really sickly. 

She used a cat carrier baited with soft food to lure the kitty to safety. Once she had him trapped in the carrier, she took him inside out of the weather. After he was warming up in her bathroom, she noticed that he had a wound on his back leg which seemed to be leaking pus. We told her to take him to Noah’s Ark, since it was apparent the little guy needed help.

Poor Albert was one very sick kitty when he arrived at the vet hospital. Not only did he have a giant wound that was horribly infected, but he also tested positive for feline leukemia. We feared that he would have to be euthanized. Thankfully, however, the vets at Noah’s Ark, Dr. Kris Haumschild and Dr. Kim West, wanted to give the little guy a chance. With antibiotics and a lot of love, Albert pulled through. We are hoping, when we re-test him in three months, that he will also test negative for feline leukemia.

Albert has now been at Noah’s Ark for about a month. He cannot get out of his cage to run around or play because he is positive for feline leukemia and cannot be in contact with the other healthy cats. While he has been gaining his strength back and healing, he is now to a point where we need to find a foster home or forever home for him so he can begin to live a normal cat’s life. Feline leukemia cats can live very long and healthy lives. Albert will need to be in a household with only dogs or with another feline leukemia kitty. Unfortunately, it is sometimes harder to find homes for positive kitties and so we are sending out a plea to anyone who might like to foster him or adopt him. 

Albert is still only a baby at around 6 months old. He is a gorgeous long haired brown tabby with some Maine Coon thrown in. He is super, super sweet and loves people. He has made so many advances from when he first arrived at the vet’s office weighing only about 3 pounds!

If you would like to adopt or foster Albert, please go to our web site and fill out an application. We really need to get Albert out of a cage and into a home.

How this baby survived we will never know.

Our second miracle kitty is named, appropriately enough, Miracle. One of our super volunteers, Debbie, had a call from one of the rangers at a local Metro park. The rangers used to work extensively with Debbie whenever they had cats dumped off in the parks. But Debbie had not heard anything from them since last summer and feared they were just rounding up most of the strays and having them euthanized.

Luckily, for this kitty, Debbie was involved. 

The ranger told Debbie that they saw a man going into the woods last Wednesday or Thursday, before we got the most recent piles of snow, with something tucked inside his coat. The “something” was little Miracle. Somehow the kitty survived the snow and cold and wild animals until the rangers called Debbie on Saturday. When Miracle came out into the parking lot, her face was buried in snow and she was so cold she couldn’t move. There was a huge chunk of fur missing on her back, showing that she somehow escaped being some other creature’s dinner. The poor cat was nothing but skin and bones and covered in fleas when Debbie rescued her. 

Miracle was so small that Debbie, at first, mistook her for a two month old kitten. Weighing in at only 4 pounds, it turned out that Miracle was actually an adult cat who was in very, very bad shape. Debbie took her to the vet where she was treated for an upper respiratory infection, diarrhea, and an infected cyst. Debbie said that she truly believed this poor girl would not have lasted another day.

Debbie had also thought that Miracle was a male, but our Miracle is one of those rare orange females. 

Miracle is safe now with Debbie, which is truly a miracle.

Miracle is going to gain some weight and grow healthy before she gets spayed and has an umbilical hernia fixed. At that time, she will be looking for a forever home. 

We know angels must have led Miracle and Albert to our care. And we also know that other angels will soon take them into their homes and love them forever.

Who wouldn't want to find me in their humane trap?

Many of the cats we have posted for adoption on our Petfinder site came from our trapping projects. When we started out doing Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) several years ago, the main goal was to trap the cats, get them fixed, and reduce the number of unwanted kittens being born each year. But always, we would catch wonderful cats and kittens in our traps, too, not just the ferals we had in mind and who wanted nothing to do with us. We’ve trapped Siamese and Himalayans and all manner of purebred cats, as well as tiny kittens that had never been around people yet still knew how to grab our hearts by purring and giving a head butt.

There are always unexpected surprises when you take on a trapping project.

The project I was working on for the past few weeks was no exception. Lots of surprises, including one very small gray and furry surprise.

I had an email at the beginning of the month about several cats in a factory warehouse area. With large semis going in and out all the time and machinery moving large pallets, the kittens born to the more wily old timers were not surviving long. Could we help?

So I set traps for several nights. The very first cat I trapped was a tiny gray kitten. It became pretty clear within the first day or so that he was not feral. In fact, he is very tame and rolls around for belly rubs as soon as you begin petting him. I don’t know how some of these kittens are so good with humans while others, in the same situations, are utterly terrified. I know this little guy wasn’t socialized and yet he loves to be petted and held.

The rest of his family, five other cats altogether, are also not acting like feral cats. They are shy, but they don’t try to escape and they don’t hiss or growl. What to make of all this?

Members of the family hanging out together after their trapping adventures.

I finally caught the last cat this past Monday. He is the senior citizen of the group at 2-3 years old. The others were all between 6 months and a year. Being the oldest, he was the smartest and had avoided the traps longer than the others. But hunger eventually won out over fear. While he was the most “feral-acting” of the clan, he still was not at all what I was expecting.

Another surprise.

This big gray male acts as if he was someone’s pet at one time and had reverted to a semi-feral nature after years of living on his own. Fearful in the trap at first, he now acts as if he is waking from a dream, remembering a former life where someone else took care of him. It is strange to see the transformation.

The little gray kitten, who is now named Samuel, will be going to PetSmart in the near future to find a new home. The rest of his family, after being assessed for adoptability, will go to a warm, safe, and very quiet barn. No more large trucks to dodge. No more being hungry and cold. No more kittens that climb up into warm engines and cannot escape. No more surprises for them. Only a calm, peaceful life on a farm.

Like little Samuel, every trapping project brings something unexpected. It gives me great joy to take those surprises and turn them into blessings for other people. Samuel will soon be someone’s loved and adored companion, as have many others that wandered into our traps. Who could have known how wonderful our traps could be, magically transforming the lives of all who enter?

Truly a surprise…

The oldest and smartest of the family and the last to be trapped.

"There is no pasta too slippery for me to steal," brags the Food Bandit, Stewie.

We have new proof that the Food Bandit is on the loose again! And once again, he has opted for the pasta, proving, as we thought, that Stewie used to be called “Little Stewie Sticky Paws” in his former life as an Italian mobster.

"No one will find me and my sweet piece of pasta here...Arrgghh! They are taking photos of my stolen property. Must find new hiding spot!"

Once the pasta is in his possession, Mr. Sticky Paws finds a place to hide out to enjoy his stolen goods. But no one will leave him alone to relish the sweet pasta decadence. So a new hideout is necessary…

"Will these people stop at nothing? Even under the bed, I am pursued! And now the rigatoni is trying to escape! Is there no peace for a food bandit?"

Under the bed goes Stewie with his rigatoni sweetie. Will the Food Bandit ever get a moment alone to savor his pasta obsession? And what is next for our Italian cuisine thief? Fettuccine? Fusilli? Linguine?

And if Stewie can fit a slice of lasagna in his mouth, we know there is no stopping the pasta kidnappings.

Stock up on a pantry full of macaroni and bring the Food Bandit home with you–he is still looking for his forever family and if you’ve got pasta, you’ve got Stewie’s heart.