Today was the first time in eight weeks that I helped transport cats to/from PAWS. As some of you know, I herniated a disc near the end of August and have been in recovery mode since then. Because of the large number of cats today, Tammy asked me if I could transport some of the cats, with others doing the loading and unloading. Of course I said 'Yes' and the other volunteers did all the heavy work - they were under strict orders to not let me pick up / carry cats. I felt kind of useless, but was able to contribute by holding doors open, buying bagels for the PAWS crew and working on paperwork (and driving, of course). Hopefully I will soon be able to sling cats with the best of them (in the nicest possible way, of course :) ).
While I've been unable to do transport, a whole plethora of volunteers have stepped up to fill the void and I want to thank them all. I have detailed their names over the past several weeks in my blog entries and I again want to say "thank you" for stepping up and helping to keep Feral Fixers in the high-volume TNR business.
There were originally 52 cats scheduled to be transported to the PAWS-Chicago Spay/Neuter clinic for spay/neuter surgery today, but one of them took ill at the last moment, so we wound up bringing 51 cats to PAWS. Super-volunteers Charli and Jennifer helped me transport cats this morning (actually, I should say that I helped them a bit - that would be more accurate) while super-volunteer Cathi and new super-volunteers Mark and Linda helped me pick up the cats from PAWS this evening and bring them back to Tammy's for recovery. It was a very busy day at PAWS, so the cats weren't ready until 6:30pm and we didn't get out of PAWS until almost 7:30pm.
Of the 51 cats brought, 33 were ferals while 18 were 'friendly ferals'. One of the ferals turned out to have already been neutered and two of the friendlies were deemed not healthy enough for surgery, so a total of 48 cats (32 ferals and 16 friendlies) were done this day. I don't have a count of how many were males and females, but it's safe to say that there were a bunch of each :)
Super-volunteer Judy was at Tammy's both this morning and evening helping out - Thanks Judy!
With these 48 cats, Feral Fixers has now processed 138 cats for October, 1,080 for the year and 7,056 overall.