Tragedy Struck the Village
When we took on the responsibility of caring for these wonderful animals, we knew we would have to take the good with the bad. Over the past two years, we had to take a few of them to the vet for minor problems. Teddy hurt his leg jumping off our porch roof and since then he stopped his high wire adventures. Sam had a possible bite to her foot while in a fight, and Orangey (when she first arrived) had ear trouble which we had taken care of. But nothing prepared us for what happened next.
One day, Smokey showed up for her morning meal and we were shocked to observe a severe eye wound on her. It took two days of hard work, but we trapped her and brought her directly to our local Veterinarian. Smokey’s first operation was to try and save her eye, which was a long shot, but worth it if her eye could be saved. My wife and I set up a medical clinic in our house to care for Smokey who is a wild animal that never lived in captivity and never was handled by a person.
For over a week, we hoped and prayed that the eye would heal. During this time, we could see that Bandit, Teddy, Sam and especially Pete were looking for Smokey. Pete normally is always at her side.
We returned to the Animal Clinic with Smokey, but after consulting with an animal ophthalmologist, the prognosis was that the eye had to be removed. Now, Smokey had to endure a second operation removing the eye and then back to our home for her to recuperate.
During this time, we had a couple of complications that were resolved by going back to the vet office. Then on May 14th 2018, Smokey was brought to the Animal Clinic to have her stitches taken out, but two stitches had to remain in for a few days. The last two stitches were removed and the Doctor advised everything went well with Smokey’s procedure. Now we have two more hurdles to complete our task with Smokey’s recovery.
First, we have to properly introduce smokey back to her family. Smokey’s scent will be different now and needs to be masked so they accept her back into the clowder. Also she does look different.
Second, we are afraid of letting her loose into the wild due to having only one eye to defend herself, and that her existing eye has a haze to it.
We hope that within the next few week to slowly introduce Smokey back to her family on our enclosed porch with one family member at a time. We are going to try and change the scent to everyone so they will all smell the same and will accept her back. We also have started to build a large cat enclosure, covering approximately 2000 sq. ft., that will be escape-proof for the clowder and will not allow intruders in.
Our future post will show Smokey’s reunion and the new enclosure for Kitty Village. We will keep you posted on how the family is doing and talk about the different adventures we have had with them.
Till then, please pass on information about feral cats and the TNVR programs in your area.
Thank you for reading Kitty Village News.
S&B
