Staff at Aldergrove Animal Clinic had quite the discovery after finding cardboard boxes containing 26 abandoned cats on the porch Friday morning.
Virginia Cornell, who owns and operates the south-end Barrie veterinary clinic, says staff found several boxes with “nursing queens with their kittens.”
“When we rewound the video tape, they’d been dropped off at about 4 a.m., so they’d been there for about three hours by the time we’d gotten in,” she said. “It was dark initially when they were dropped off, but when we got there, there were a couple wandering outside of the box … so we hope that there weren’t more that had escaped and gotten into the empty lot beside the building that we don’t know about.”
Cornell assessed the animals Friday and said only four of the 26 were “fully healthy.”
“The other 22 all had medical problems of some sort. Most of them were minor medical problems. The majority of them had conjunctivitis. Some of them had diarrhea, which might be a mild problem or ongoing … We are just waiting for test results to come back, but it remains to be seen if that’s going to be a long-term problem.”
One of the felines, she added, is going to require surgery to deal with a “very severe” eye problem.
Cornell admitted although she has mixed feelings over the animals being abandoned, she’s trying to focus on the positive.
“I think everyone’s natural reaction is instant anger at the person who dropped them off. I feel it was irresponsible for somebody to let themselves get into a situation where they had this many cats that they could not take care of. These cats were all rag dolls and were all used for breeding purposes. I think maybe someone initially thought they could make some money doing some breeding and got in way over their head and couldn’t afford to take care of the cats once they started to get sick,” she said.
Rather than approaching it from the perspective of anger, Cornell is relieved the cats were brought to a place where they could receive care.
“This person could have made a really bad decision and put these cats in a burlap bag and thrown them in a lake or abandoned them in a field where they weren’t going to get any care at all and they’d just suffer and die. Thank goodness they took them somewhere they could get help and thank goodness there are rescues like Furry Friends who … help to take care of these kitties,” she said.
The cats were picked up by Furry Friends Animal Shelter, a Barrie-based non-profit, no-kill organization dedicated to providing shelter and love to abandoned, lost or rescued animals in the community.
Nicole Swyers, the volunteer feline co-ordinator for the Hart Drive animal shelter, said it’s a lot for the entirely volunteer-run facility to take on both space-wise and financially.
“We spent three to four hours here (Friday) cleaning out these cages and moving the cats that were (upstairs) down … to get ready for these guys to come in. Now we are looking for fosters because we don’t typically keep kittens here because of the care that they need. The fact that they all need eye meds and some have other meds is harder because some people are just not comfortable doing that,” she said.
The cats, she added, will likely cost the shelter about $12,000 to cover the costs of having them spayed and neutered, as well as various medications, and surgery for at least one.
“It’s going to be a stretch both people-wise and money-wise. It’s hard, but we did what we needed to do. We had five people, all from the board, come out and do the changes we needed to make, and by 4:30 p.m. we had them here,” Swyers said.
“We will do the best we can. There’s a lot of praying, because they’re very small for their age and we have to hope for the best. That’s all we can do.”
In addition to seeking foster care for the kittens and their mothers, the shelter will be in need of financial support to help cover the costs of their medical care.
“That’s what is going to cost the most money,” Swyers said.
