A Kitty Carpool

Twenty-three cats here today. Five arrived via a carpool from Monroe. John Lee, Roger, Little, Silver and Kitty are from the same litter with three different owners. Since they all live in Monroe the owners decided to combine forces and have one person drive them up here this morning and another will be back this afternoon to pick them up. Great idea. Very impressed with their organizational skills.

We laughed when one of our assistants suggested that this is our first experience with a transport. It was funny because our goal is to start a transport operation in the next four or five months. A truck would leave our building every morning to depart to a different Charlotte suburb, pick up cats and dogs, bring them back here to the clinic to be fixed and then return them the next day to their owners. It will be a great way for us to offer a service for pet owners who aren’t able to drive here and to widen our footprint in the community.

Stay tuned for more details.

And before I go, I must tell you a hilarious story (that should make all you cat owners chuckle). So yesterday we had quite a few cats in the building who were in a bad mood (bad mood being a euphemism for really, pardon my french, pissed off.) As I have probably explained previously this is not an uncommon phenomenon here at Spay Neuter Charlotte and frankly, anywhere that provides services for kitty cats. Put a cat in a strange environment, give them sedation and pain medicine and what you end up with are cranky cats. And when one cat is cranky it rubs off, so EVERYBODY is cranky. There was this one cat, Boots who won the prize for crankiest cat. It looked like something from one of those kiddie cartoons where the cat is spinning in a circle surrounded by a cloud of expletive symbols when we moved him from his kennel to his cat carrier to go home this morning. We warned the owner when she arrived to pick him up that she probably should keep him isolated until he calmed down.

Turned out no warning was required. As soon as we put his carrier down on the counter and he caught sight of his mom it was as if someone waved a magic wand over him and turned him into cuddly boy. He started to purr (loudly), turned over on his back and then reached out to softly touch her on the cheeks with his paws. (She said that she had raised him and his sister Sophie from week old babies, had to bottle feed them for the first few months.) Moral of the story - we don’t hold it against you or your cat when they are sometimes ill-mannered while here with us. We know we tend to bring out the worst in them and that all will be well when they are returned to their loving owners.