Vet and Rehoming Update

Hi All,

Last night Mr Monochrome went to his new home. It was strange because he is usually really out going and bouncy but when I dropped him off at his new home he was really shy and did not really do anything. The young boy who he is now living with, Cruze, loves him and was very good with him. I have a very cute picture of them together which I will post soon.

Now for the vet updates; and this time it is all good news (expect for for our bank balance but who cares about that).

Moose successfully had all her teeth out yesterday :) and we are collecting her today. I can't wiat to see what she is like.

And little Splotches too is doing well. The vet said that the toxins in her body have come down significantly and she is eating on her own now. She will stay at the vets until Saturday when she can come home. The vet said that she will need to be administered fuilds every few days under the skin so that will be a learning curve for us but if will help her it will be find.

I will see Splotches today when I collect Moose so I will update you on how she is going tonight.

Love Jasmine

Wonderful Splotches

Things are sadly not looking good for Splotches. Three weeks ago Splotch went to the vet and was diagnosed with Chronic Renal Failure. This basically means that her kidneys are not functioning very well at all and this will eventually lead to her body becoming toxic at which point she will become very unwell. She was given two types of medicine and a special diet to manage this problem. We decided that we would keep her rather than rehoming her as our girl Misty (below) is 14 years old and she also has Renal Failure so we know how to manage it. Though Misty’s is not yet as bad as we got on to it much earlier.

Over the last two days Splotches has not really been eating or doing anything other than sleeping. We took her to the vet last night and he said that things were not looking very well. She stayed at the vet hospital over night and was given fluids today to de-toxify her body. The vet also carried out blood test which confirmed that the toxins in her body have been building up. This has been making her feel sick and made her not want to eat. As a result she has lost nearly 600grams since her vet visit just three weeks ago.

She will stay in the vet hospital for a few days on fluids to see if that can de-toxify her body and stabilize her. If this does not work she will not have long with us.

Moose and Her Teeth

Moose has now been to the vet twice and has been diagnosed with gingivitis. As I type she is sleeping at the vets and in the morning will be tested for kidney function and FIV as well as a general blood test. On Thursday she will have ALL of her teeth removed. The vet assures me that she will still be able to eat.

She really is such a lovely girl with a very friendly nature despite being a pain because of her teeth. Over the last day or so she has been sleeping more than normal and has not really been eating so now is definitely time for her dental work. After that she should be back to normal.

Meet Herbert the Hedgehog

Last week Kelsie and Brendan found a little hedgehog on the side of the road who did not seem quite right so they bought him home. He came known as Herbert and he turned out to be a little boy.

We quickly read our little Hedgehog Rescue book and fixed him a bed with a hot water bottle and towel as was recommended. We also gave him lots of water and cat food.

He ate lots of food and then had a long nap. The next day he seemed better and was running around the room when we let him out to play however after this he seemed to go into a deep sleep that he never came out of. Unfortunately we found him dead the following morning in his bed.

It was very sad that he did not make it but we are happy we could give him a feed, warm bed and love in his final days.

Backyard Catz: Scratches, Homes and Collars

The Grey Lynn cats are all fixed now bar one tortoiseshell female (below) who still continues to evade us.

The week before last we had Bumblebee (below) at home after being desexed. She is very very cute and friendly; we at least I think so. Kelsie would disagree; she did not find Bumblebee that nice after she tried to scratch her, but with me she was fine.

Over the last week I have been re-trapping three of the cats (Tangelo, Pumpkin and Mr Monochrome Senior) because I put collars on them after they were desexed and these were proving problematic. Many colony cats have their left ear tipped (meaning the vet takes a small clip out of the ear) so that they can be identified as having been de-sexed but I thought that this would be better achieved with collars however I now know why this is not actually a good idea. Collars are all well and good on cats who you know and that you can easily pick up should the collar need to be loosened or the cats get stuck on it.

Collars on cats who are not that used to being handled is a different matter entirely. Mr Monochrome Senior somehow got his caught around his stomach and both Tangelo and Pumpkin needed to have theirs loosened. I caught Tangelo by hand but she scratched the shit out of my arm and I had to let her go.

A few days later I went back with the trap and caught Mr Monochrome Senior and Pumpkin and sorted them out. Tangelo however was too smart for me and I will have to try her again this week. Needless to say the collars have been permanently removed.

It is interesting how I have found all the cats handleable when they were at home however as soon as they are returned to outside they revert back to being a bit more ‘wild’.

Good news on the rehoming front though; Mr Monochrome has found a home with a lovely family in West Auckland and he will be going there this week and Mr Monochrome Senior has won over the hearts of Rosilina and her family and he will stay with them when the others have been rehomed.

If anyone reading this is interested in rehoming one of these cats please see our Animal Adoption Page.

The Story Behind the Backyard Catz Colony

After starting to help with a South Auckland cat colony recently Animal Liberation Aotearoa members have started to manage another small cat colony living in Grey Lynn. We came across these cats after reading an article in the local paper, Harbour News.

The article read:

A woman battling with 15 feral cats on her property is at her wits’ end after being refused help.

Grey Lynn resident Rosalina Solomona-Kali says her property has become home to a growing number of cats during the last several months.

She says her two sons are constantly sick with colds, allergies and flea bites and her sister’s two young children contracted scabies while on a visit from Australia last year.

"They just came out of nowhere and before you knew it they were breeding," she says.

"I can’t understand it because we’re not feeding them."

Ms Solomona-Kali started phoning the SPCA in October last year, in the hope it could help with the problem.

She says she was told her only choice would be to hire trapping equipment for each of the cats from a pest control company, at a cost of $50 each.

"I’m from a low-income family, I can’t afford $50 each for 15 cats that aren’t mine," she says.

Ms Solomona-Kali has also contacted the Auckland City Council and the Auckland Regional Council who both said they are unable to help.

She also sent a letter to Auckland mayor John Banks pleading for help.

A response Mr Banks on March 6 confirmed there is no legal action the council can take as the cats have no owner.

In the letter Mr Banks suggests methods such as using Zoo Poo fertiliser and placing mirrors or bottles of water around the garden to scare the cats away.

Mr Banks calls the trapping of cats "emotive, expensive and not without problems", and says it is also often an ineffective and only temporary solution.

But Ms Solomona-Kali says there is such a large number of the cats, she doesn’t think minor measures such as mirrors will work.

She says the skittish, un-tamed cats, some of which are very young kittens, would be difficult to catch without professional help.

The situation has left her feeling exasperated and helpless, she says.

"I’ve gone through all the right pipelines and no-one wants to help me."

When contacted by the Auckland City Harbour News, regional council biosecurity officer Andrew Stein confirmed it is unable to help as it only deals with feral cat populations in rural areas.

SPCA chief executive Bob Kerridge also suggested that Ms Solomona-Kali contact a pest control company who would trap the cats

But after calling several pest control companies in the wider Auckland area, the Auckland City Harbour News was unable to find any who could help.

We responded to this article in the paper by offering to desex, vet check and feed the cats until we find them permanent homes.

This blog will follow their journey, please check back regularly to see what the cats are up to and how you can help.

Meet Chicken

On Sunday while travelling through the countryside near Whangarei we found a brown shaver hen pecking in the grass on the roadside outside a free range egg farm. We picked her up and put her in a cage in the car. She spent the rest of the afternoon with us driving round. We gave her the very imaginative name of Chicken, maybe we had been in the car too long but think it suited her quite well.

In the early evening we dropped her off at her new home where she will be able to live out the rest of her natural life.

Why take a hen from a Free Range Farm you ask.

Even though hens on a free range farm are not in cages and can move around they are still only there to make profit for the farmers. When hens on both battery and free range farms stop laying ‘enough’ eggs to be profitable they are all sent to slaughter. So even a so called ‘free range’ hen who could live for 15 years has her life cut short to only a couple of years.

Naturally hens live in very small flocks however on many free range farms hens are forced to live in flocks much larger than that, some even over one thousand birds. This causes stress to the hens and makes it hard for them to form hierarchies, which are an integral part of a hens social structure.

Living in larger groups can also lead to hens becoming aggressive and peaking each other. Like on battery hen farms many ‘free range’ farmers remedy this situation by cutting the tip of the hens beak off; this is known as de-beaking. This procedure is carried out when the hens are chicks and is very painful as there are many nerves in a hen’s beak. Glenrocks Free Range farm where Chicken came from used this practice.

Many free range egg farms source their hens from the same hatcheries used by battery hen farmers. The parents of these chicks are factory farmed and live in over-crowed sheds in conditions much like those of broiler (meat) chickens. When fertilised eggs are laid they are taken from the mothers and placed inside incubators until they are ready to hatch. At this point the eggs are placed in draws until they hatch. Half of the chicks will be males, who obviously cannot produce eggs. At one day old the chicks are sorted by gender; because the males are not economically useful they are killed; either by gassing, neck dislocation or instantaneous fragmentation (which basically means being minced alive). This is the same for both the battery hen and free range industry. For every female hen in a battery hen cage or on a free range farm there is a chick who was killed because he made the misfortune of being born a male.

Cats To Be Put To Sleep - Not If We Can Help It

Last week we were contacted by a man who had been left three older cats when his father died. These cats did not get on with his cat and so were forced to live outside. Furthermore he was moving and could not take the cats with him. He took the three cats into Animal Welfare in the hope that they could rehome them. However given the cats age he was advised that they would likely be put to sleep if left with Animal Welfare. Many thousands of adult cats was killed every year because most people only want kittens.

The man did not want to see this happen to his fathers cats and he and Animal Welfare contacted us to help; which of course we were happy to do. When it came time to collect the cats we got some good news that one of the cats, a large ginger male, had caught the eye of the person buying the mans house and he was going to stay with him. This meant we only got two cats, which is good given that we are busy with the Backyard Catz.

We were not told what the cats names were or anything about them really; only that they are about five years old. One smaller girl is tortoiseshell and we call her Splotches. She is timid but this could be because she is underweight and has an infected eye that will probably have to be removed. Splotches will go to the vet soon to have this looked at.

The other one is a very large chocolate coloured female we call Moose. She is very vocal and not too shy. She is also overweight and will have to go on a special diet.

Backyard Catz Trapping and Dexing Begins

Over the last two weeks have begun trapping and desexing the cats at the Grey Lynn colony. There are eight adults and one kitten in total. On our first visit we caught two tabby females, who we subsequently called Possum and Tangelo, and a little black and white male kitten we now call Mr Monochrome.

We had Possum (the larger one) and Tangelo (the small tabby/tortie) desexed, defleaed and wormed the following day. We then kept them at home for a week until they had healed and a bit and to get them used to people. They were surprisingly easy to handle.

As for Mr Monochrome when we got him he had cat flu, was covered in fleas and was very malnourished. Being that he was so little and unwell we decided to keep him with us until he finds a home. He is far to young to be desexed at the moment and even to be treated with normal flea treatment so we gave a flea bath instead.

After a week at home we returned Possum and Tangelo to the colony and trapped more cats. This time we only caught two; a young ginger male and a slightly older black and white male who might be Mr Monochromes dad. We suspect the cats might be getting wise to our trapping plan as they are way more cautious now.


When we feed the rest of the cats Possum and Tangelo were much less scared of us than they had been before they stayed with us.


The two males we trapped were taken home and desexed, de-fleaed and wormed the following day. The ginger one we call Pumpkin and the black and white one we call Mr Monochrome Senior as he is probably Mr Monochromes dad.


They have been here a week now and we will be returning them tonight and trying to trap the remaining two females and one ginger male.