Today was truly a strange day...

Feral Fixers brought in 26 cats to the PAWS-Chicago Spay/Neuter clinic to be fixed. 16 of these cats were ferals while the other 10 were 'friendly ferals'. 19 of these cats turned out to be males while the other 7 were females.

Super-volunteers Charli and Heather picked up the cats from Tammy's this morning and brought them to PAWS (Thanks Charli! Thanks Heather!) while I picked them up from PAWS this evening and brought them back to Tammy's for recovery and distribution. And, as always, super-volunteer Judy was there in the am and pm, helping out with everything (Thanks Judy!).

I received a text from Tammy this morning telling me that one of our cats had given birth after being dropped off at PAWS. While rare, this has happened to us before. And, when I arrived at PAWS this evening to pick up cats (it was a busy day at PAWS - our cats weren't ready until 6pm to be picked up), I received another text from Tammy telling me that yet another cat of ours had given birth before surgery. And when I walked in the door at PAWS, I found out that a THIRD cat (fortunately, this one wasn't ours) at PAWS today gave birth before surgery. I'm pretty sure that's a record for PAWS.

I was all alone picking up cats this evening because Tammy can make a pretty good estimate as to how many cats I can fit into my SUV - and normally, these 26 cats would fit. However, PAWS moved one of the mama cats and her kittens into an absolutely ginormous cat carrier - when I saw that, I said that there was no way all of the cats would fit into my car. Fortunately, the cat they gave the huge carrier too turned out to be NOT our cat, so I was able to fit in all 26 cats and bring them back (listening to the babies all the way!).

And, as a final kicker, one of the ferals we brought in turned out to have already been neutered.

At last count, there were nine kittens (one litter of six and one litter of three), but that number may change if Tammy / Judy find more or less kittens when they move the families into their temporary homes.

So to summarize, we brought 26 cats in to PAWS, we brought back 35 cats from PAWS (at last count), two gave birth and one was already neutered. If I haven't messed up the math, that means we had 23 more cats fixed today bringing our monthly total to 24, our yearly total to 257 and our overall total to 7,535

(There are two picture thumbnails, one of one of the mama cats and one of her six(?) kittens. Click on either of them to see a full-size picture. You'll note that all of them are grey tabbies).