The sick, the lost and the lucky

A day in the life of the SPCA is a life-and-death story.   

"You might not want to watch this bit," warns Geoff Sutton.

The Christchurch manager of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) is right. I don't really want to. But it has to be seen, I feel.

Violent sneezes have been coming out from under a blanketed cage.

A shelter worker plucks out a pale ginger tomcat and holds it on the stainless-steel bench in a firm embrace. The vet waves his electric razor, making a neat, bare strip on a front leg. The syringe goes in.

Within barely a second, the eyes relax, a pink tongue slips out. The shot of the barbiturate sodium pentobarbital takes surprisingly fast effect. The dead cat is slipped into a sturdy white plastic sack for disposal.

Last year, the SPCA "euthed" (euthanised) or "sectioned" (destroyed under section 138: for humane reasons) some 609 domestic cats, 417 kittens and 73 feral cats. A typical annual total.

The dead tom was picked up in Shirley a week ago. Somewhere a family might be anxiously wondering where old puss has got to.

Ross Blanks, the visiting vet from the local Hornby clinic, says more likely not.

Keeping his anger in check he hardly enjoys this aspect of the job Blanks points to the fact the cat was not microchipped and was entire, the fuzzy bumps of its wedding tackle still visible. Chances are it was a kitten that outlived its appeal. Easy come, easy go.

Either way, it had had its statutory seven days in an isolation cage, waiting for an owner to claim it.

The eighth day is decision day re-home or destroy. And a chesty bout of flu tipped the balance. "Disease spreads too easily here with so many cats confined and stressed. The risk isn't worth it," says Blanks.

About half the cats that pass through the SPCA's hands are euthed. And Sutton admits the shelter can get it wrong.

In June, Maude, a runaway black-and-white moggy found in Merivale, was put down only hours after it was brought in.

The cat was spitting, wild and uncontrollable when staff tried to make the routine checks. A few long gashes still show on Sutton's wrist.

It seemed like a feral cat. But it turned out later it just had an old neck injury that caused it to go mad when held by the scruff.

Maude's young student owner had been frantically posting up cat-missing notices in her neighbourhood. She had even rung through details to the SPCA office.

"I made a really bad call," says Sutton glumly. A former fire-fighter, now 15 years in animal welfare, his eyes rim with tears.

Cats have an odd place in our hearts and an anomalous place in our law books. They exist in a grey area between the domesticated and the wild.

Our relationship with dogs is more functional. Dogs were bred for a purpose. And as potentially dangerous beasts, their ownership is tightly controlled.

You need council permission to have more than one. They have to be registered, microchipped, fenced, kept in check. If they poop in the park, you are at least expected to bag it.

But cats. They just roam about looking smug. They poke their noses in your garage, mess in your shrubbery, have their yeowling contests in the small hours.

They slip into and out of our lives like mercury, having little reason to be except perhaps playing the role of some kind of elegant kinetic artwork, a slinky presence in our homes and streets.

There are hardly any laws around cat ownership apart from standard animal-cruelty ones.

If you want 40 in your house, why not? And what your cats get up to is not your responsibility. At least that is what most owners feel, because everyone knows that cats are laws unto themselves.

Sutton points out that the SPCA is not meant to be a cat sanctuary. As a charity, its mission is animal welfare. It is there to care for the sick, the suffering, the ill-treated, not the healthy but unwanted.

And it is there for the welfare of all species, from frogs to sheep to deer. Yet caring for cats ends up dominating its shelter work.

Cats are not controlled in their numbers or their behaviour, so it is cats that create a lot of problems.

Other cat-specific organisations exist, like the Cats Protection League and Cats Unloved, but the SPCA is mostly expected to carry the can.

Sutton checks his spreadsheets. Just look at the number of callouts for cats HBCed hit by car. The SPCA ambulance service attended some 500 emergencies in 2007, 369 of them cats.

What is a typical day like down at the SPCA's shelter in Hornby?

Early morning and the dogs are barking like mad as the staff arrive.

In summer - kitten season - the shelter is busting at the seams. But winter is a little quieter. Rain also reduces the number of strays.

Field officer Rebekah "Becks" Standeven, a recent recruit, says she was on duty all weekend without any callouts. A nice change.

We are loading a van with half a dozen cats and a doberman, a job lot heading to the local vet for a day of desexing and microchipping.

For the cats, this means they are not too sick or cantankerous to hope to find new owners. They have gone unclaimed for a week and now the SPCA is spending good money to make them candidates for re-homing.

The SPCA charges for a rescue pet, yet even so, it costs the society about $150 for every cat, $250 for every dog, that is saved this way.

Sheba, the doberman, is one of the shelter's recent success stories. Dumped on a snowy road at dead of night, she was a bag of bones. Now that the owner has been traced and prosecuted, Sheba is no longer "evidence".

She can be put up for adoption, fully recovered, a picture of tail-wagging canine health. And newspaper accounts of her case mean there is already a queue of ready adopters stretching to Nelson.

After the vet trip comes the first emergency call. A cat knocked down in Avondale.

By the time we get there, it is reported the cat has bounced up and scuttled through the catflap of a house.

"Can't be too badly hurt then," says Standeven.

Standeven peers through the windows of the empty home but no cat can be seen.

A kindly neighbour has tucked a note into the front door jamb, giving his eyewitness account of the incident. Standeven adds her own report so the owner knows to give the cat a check over, just in case.

Back at the shelter it is past 10am and the gates are open to the public. Another recent recruit, education officer Jasmine Mahalm, is now the one with a tear in the eye.

A soldier has come with his cat, a handsome white puss called Snapper. He has been given four days to dispose of it before he is moved out.

Again, that is not really the SPCA's job. It is there for animals in distress, not to deal with society's surplus pets. And Sutton says the easier you make it for people to pass their problems on, the more lightly they will take their ownership responsibilities.

However, he says everything must be a balance of head and heart. So the shelter has its guidelines rather than rules. Cases are treated on their merits.

Mahalm is doing Snapper's health checks to make sure he is suitable for re-homing red-eyed because the soldier owner was so upset having to say his own last goodbyes.

Oh no. Snapper's ears show dark spots under the ultraviolet lamp, suggesting ringworm. The condition is easily treated but would still be a death sentence because of the cost, time and danger of cross-infection.

Mahalm flings her arms protectively around Snapper. "I'll foster him. He's such a lovely cat," she protests, while knowing this is the way staff feel about every hopeless case.

The shelter has had to limit itself to just two official centre cats, Rusty and Meg. Both are three-legged, allowing them preferential treatment.

Luckily, Snapper's ears are just dirty. Mahalm is relieved. A good-looking animal, there should be no trouble finding him a new home.

If the sad side is that a lot of stray cats have to be put down each year because they are too ill, or there is too little room, then the happy story is that a larger number are rescued.

And though it may take a few months, even the most unprepossessing and sour-faced manage to hook themselves a human eventually.

In the "gym", a large cage where all the candidates for re-homing hang out, Basil puts on a sloppy grin and comes and sits by my ankle. He gazes up with what he surely thinks is his most beguiling "take me home with you, why not, you only have two cats already?" expression.

Yes Basil, I think. If only you weren't quite so dopey-looking and shedding so many hairs.

Josephine, a fluffy one-eyed tabby, pads over to try her luck. My own cats are rarely this friendly except when I'm rattling a big bag of cat nuts, I note.

Mahalm says it is like running a speed-dating service. And cats are pretty good at picking out the owners they want; good at melting hearts.

One of the day's fortunates is Boof nearly the cause of a domestic at the Sutton household over the weekend.

Sutton says Boof - "... because she is just a boof-head, a big, fat owl's face on this little body" - had tugged on his own heart strings.

He had taken her home to foster for a few days while she recovered from illness. In his job, you learn to stifle the urge, yet he was about to break his rules and keep her, adding to the menagerie at home. But his wife put her foot down.

He is not surprised to hear that someone else has almost instantly been won over.

And so the day continues with its small triumphs, small disasters. A quivering black-and-tan fox terrier pup is brought in, found abandoned in a cardboard box in Linwood Park. A few have turned up in the same park recently.

A steady trickle of people drop by, looking for a pet or hoping to be reunited with one. Or even just wanting to give a little love to the likes of Basil and Josephine.

If I can't take you home, they say, I can still give you a bit of a tickle, a bit of a play.

Sutton says the shelter does not mind this. In fact, it helps keep the animals socialised. The staff have not got the time to give all the cats and dogs individual attention, especially during the summer kitten months.

Sutton is hoping one day there will be fewer cats arriving at the shelter.

Microchipping standards have finally been sorted out for cats and it should now be a routine precaution. Cats not chipped at birth can be done at their next vet visit. This will make reuniting strays and owners a cinch.

There is also the excellent job being done by the SPCA's mobile desexing clinic a vets' surgery on wheels that neutered 637 cats and 178 dogs in a campaign around Christchurch earlier this year.

And the SPCA is trying to teach owners about their responsibilities. This is why it has created the new education-officer post and built a new education room at the shelter.

Some say the SPCA should be throwing its doors open, saving every unwanted kitten or cat. But Sutton says the problem needs to be dealt with at source. Stemming the flow is the proper way to reduce the euthanasia toll.

It is the end of the afternoon and Sutton is in reflective mood. Quietly he confides some news.

Remember Maude, the spitball cat that got put down? How one mistake can undo so much good work. The whole team was hit hard.

Well, the owner has just said she is interested in re-homing one of the cats we took for microchipping and desexing today. The shelter is really grateful for that.

Sutton looks away, removes his glasses and rubs an eye.

Reference: www.stuff.co.nz

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