Fostering Felines

It was on an evening 17 years ago when Yezi, then still a university student, made her connection to felines. She met a kitten on the street below the building where she was renting an apartment, its eyes filled with mucus discharge, and was touched by its helpless mewing.

“When I see an injured or abandoned stray cat on the street, I just can’t turn away… I have to do something.” Yezi is the most senior of the hundreds of people in Taiwan who volunteer to be “foster parents” running “halfway houses” for felines. She has taken in and cared for over 500 cats. She is so smitten with them that, despite suffering from asthma and being allergic to cat fur, she currently has more than 30 at home. Her doctor tells her she is committing slow-motion suicide, but she does not complain and has no regrets.

Street cats are all around us, living at their own pace rain and shine. The best strategy for coexisting with street cats is to capture them, neuter and vaccinate them, and then release them back to where they were found.

Foster parents take in and care for stray cats which have been abused or abandoned by their owners, or are sick or injured. Halfway homes provide comprehensive care, and after being sure that a cat is in a stable and healthy condition, will look for a suitable permanent home for the creature.

But it’s not just a simple matter of picking up cats and bringing them home. The process is difficult and, at times, risky. It is not every feline who just sits there quietly waiting to be caught, and the sick or injured may carry viruses, bacteria, fleas, or other parasites. Cats are also by nature very cautious and defensive. Therefore when volunteers head out to capture strays, they must prepare gloves, food, and cage traps, and then “wait patiently in ambush” for their prey/beneficiary. Sometimes it takes a whole night just to catch a single animal.

But just catching the cat is only the beginning. “The most important thing when you take a cat home is quarantine,” says Yezi. No matter how healthy a feral cat may look, new arrivals have to be kept isolated or they may transmit infectious diseases to the other felines in your house.

Rescued cats are found in many different conditions and situations. The most difficult to care for are newborn kittens that should still be breastfeeding.

 

Newborn kittens in nature are not weaned until about a month after birth, so during this time foster parents have to play the role of the mother cat. They must prepare milk from a powder made especially for kittens (who should not drink cow’s milk), and feed them using a special nipple every three to four hours. Newborns have to be taught to defecate on their own, so foster parents must wipe a kitten’s anus and urinary tract with a wet cloth to replicate the licking of these areas normally done by the mother. Newborns have low resistance to disease, so special attention must be devoted to keeping them clean and warm and under constant supervision, taking them to the vet at the first sign of trouble.

Nonetheless, no matter how careful foster parents are, newborns that get sick have a very high mortality rate.

“When you see them struggling to stand up with their tiny little bodies, you forget how tired you are.” Yezi recalls one newborn kitten called Strong. When she was found she was covered in sores and there were maggots crawling all over her, and even the vet advised Yezi to give up on her. But Yezi picked off the maggots one by one, and the kitten showed real pluck by drinking down some milk, and her life was saved. She survived for over 10 more years.

Some kinds of cats—the timid, the abused, cats that require special care—are not suited to be given away to new owners, so in such cases Yezi always psychologically prepares herself to keep the animal until the end of its life.

For example, she has a cat named Little Four, who was hit by a car, and all his organs were squeezed into the upper part of his body. He now lives comfortably in Yezi’s cat “apartment block,” but is unable to move around and has trouble even breathing, much less eating. Yezi has an oxygen machine for Little Four, giving him pure O2 four hours per day, so as to reduce the impact of his breathing problems. “My hope is that before he passes away he will have a chance to try every kind of cat food,” says Yezi. Little Four could die at any moment, but until that moment comes, she plans to give him the best possible care.

 

When a feline’s physical and psychological condition has stabilized, foster parents will put up an ad on one of the many adoption websites run by various animal welfare groups in Taiwan, providing a recent photo of the cat and details of its history.

“Each and every cat is a unique treasure,” says Yezi. To ensure that each one finds the best possible home, halfway houses have a strict process for adoption.

After a would-be adopter applies for an animal through a website, they must first fill out a questionnaire and leave basic personal details, and also do a self-evaluation of their fitness to adopt—including economic circumstances, living space, and work vs. free time. Because there was once an incident in which a cat jumped five stories to its death because the adopting family had no screens on their windows, foster parents usually personally visit a prospective adopter’s home and inspect the living environment, making suggestions for improvements to ensure the animal’s safety.

Then it is the turn of the adopter to go to the halfway home to meet the cat to see if they are mutually compatible. Generally speaking, would-be adopters are not allowed to take the cat home the first time they meet. Yezi, for example, requires potential adopters to wait three days to think things through before making a final decision.

Adopters also have to sign agreements in which they guarantee that they will treat the cat well, respect its innate behaviors, have an identity chip implanted, and get follow-up vaccinations against disease. Otherwise the foster parent reserves the right to take the creature back.

Street cats are all around us, living at their own pace rain and shine. The best strategy for coexisting with street cats is to capture them, neuter and vaccinate them, and then release them back to where they were found.

If you are interested in becoming a cat foster parent, you might want to know what a typical day is like.

Normally a day at a halfway house starts at around 5:30 in the morning. First you feed the kittens and put out food for the adult cats. Then you clean out the litter box. When you are done with feline affairs you have just enough time to brush your teeth, wash your face, and get out the door to go to work.

While you are at work, you may be contacted by a fire department or volunteer who has rescued a cat that has been abused or is in difficulty of some kind. If you can take it in, and time permits, it often happens that you will have to take time off work to go and collect the cat.

“The first thing you need to do when you get home after work is feed the cats again and clean out the litter box again,” says Yezi. If you have only one cat, it is only necessary to change the litter once every three or four days, but given the population in a cat apartment, you have to do it at least twice a day. You clean up the cats’ living space a bit, and then you have to take any that are in need of medical attention to the vet. By the time you get home, you realize you haven’t had a free moment even to eat, and it’s already past nine. But now you have to go online and update photos and information about animals that are up for adoption.

“One person can only do so much, but if everyone were to treat animals more humanely, Taiwan would be a better place,” says Yezi with conviction. After several years of being a cat foster parent, she realizes how miniscule she is. This is why she and her boyfriend launched the “Taiwan Adoption Map” website, hoping to persuade even more people to start halfway houses and spread the burden around a little.

The international practice is that feral cats that have been neutered are marked by ­having an ear clipped—left for males, and right for females. This helps prevent their ­unecessary recapture. Neutured females will not go into heat, and thus will not ­caterwaul, and neutered males will not urinate everywhere to mark out territories. But they’ll still help catch cockroaches and rats! What great neighbors!

One of the main reasons why people can’t take on the responsibility of fostering is economic, but in New Tai­pei City, four young women have thought of a pragmatic approach by opening a coffee shop that is also a halfway house.

Located on the boundary between the city’s San­chong and Lu­zhou districts, the Stray Cat Halfway House Café is similar to those pet restaurants that were all the rage for a while. You can get a coffee or light snack, while enjoying the feeling of adorable cats rubbing past you. You can pleasurably spend your free time just watching them romp and play. The biggest difference between the café and pet restaurants is that here, if a customer feels chemistry with one of the residents, they can apply on the spot to adopt the animal.

Of course the adoption process remains rigorous. As one of the founders, ­Xiaoye, says: “If you aren’t a ‘cat slave’ [i.e., crazy about cats], don’t come here to adopt one of ours.”

These young women don’t care how much money they make; their lives instead are focused on the well-being of the cats. Their attitude is, “So long as we don’t starve to death, the important thing is for the cats to eat well and have a warm safe place to sleep.” The expenses for the 20-plus cats currently in the café are covered entirely by revenues at the shop, and in the less than one year since they opened they have given away more than 100 cats for adoption.

The cat apartment block constructed by cat foster parent Yezi and her boyfriend is warm and welcoming. Watching their cats live happy and healthy lives is the only reward that cat foster parents really want.

In recent years, aiming to create a space for mutual coexistence between street cats and people in the city, animal protection organizations in Taiwan have been strongly promoting the strategy of “trap, neuter, and release” (TNR), capturing and neutering stray cats and then releasing them where they were found, instead of euthanizing them.

Cats that have been neutered will not experience estrus (the fertile period of the reproductive cycle), so the annoyance of late-night caterwauling is eliminated. Also, neuteured males will not urinate all over the place to mark territory. In addition, once a few cats have settled into a neighborhood, they will deter others from entering, keeping the local feline population at a stable level, and the area will also have fewer rats and cockroaches. Obviously there are a lot of advantages to this approach.

The Tai­pei Stray Cats Protection Association points out that a local feline population can be capped even if only 70% of the cats in a neighborhood are neutered. Over the last three years, the Tai­pei City Government and animal rights groups have worked together to undertake TNR in nearly 200 city wards. More than 4000 cats have been neutered, and the wards that have joined in the program have had astounding success. The policy has cost a mere NT$5 million so far, a small investment with huge returns.

Street cats are all around us, living at their own pace rain and shine. The best strategy for coexisting with street cats is to capture them, neuter and vaccinate them, and then release them back to where they were found.

This July, Taiwan had its first cases of rabies in decades, and many people went into panic mode. Some pet owners went so far as to abandon long-time companions, and animal shelters were suddenly filled to bursting.

The Council of Agriculture, the government agency with jurisdiction over animal welfare, explains that pets adopted through animal shelters have all had rabies vaccinations, and will not get the disease even if bitten by an infected animal. Foster parents and TNR volunteers always get new cats inoculated at animal hospitals first thing.

The writer Chu Tien-hsin has written that street cats and dogs that have been vaccinated against rabies in fact form a firewall against feral animals entering their territory, so people who capture and kill street cats out of fear that they may be rabid are in fact tearing down their own defense lines.

We all have to be better informed about our animal friends, and teach the next generation to respect them and treat them well. The whole world will become a better place as a result.

The Stray Cat Halfway House Café is a win-win space where people and felines each benefit from the presence of the other. When a cat has been adopted, a commemorative photo will be hung from the tree painted on the wall of the café.

 

The cat apartment block constructed by cat foster parent Yezi and her boyfriend is warm and welcoming. Watching their cats live happy and healthy lives is the only reward that cat foster parents really want.