The Truth Behind TFM: Fluff-Bucket!

Fluff-Bucket

This week, we are giving you an inside look on our youngest pup’s childhood. Considering he’s only a year and a half, this wasn’t that long ago. ^_~ You see, Snarf, well he suffered from that horrible habit that most puppies have: he chewed. He chewed on socks. He chewed on stuffed animals. He chewed on shoes, on wires, on plastic bottles, he chewed on anything he could get his teeth on. And that brings us to the most recent The Family Menagerie comic.

Alright, so sometimes we may indulge a little in the comics, but this isn’t that far off. There have been a few chewing incidents that have left shreds of tissue throughout the bathroom and all over the kitchen. Cottonballs in the hallway. Shirt scraps under the couch, a jacket in the kennel full of holes. Pieces of cardboard ripped into millions of tiny pieces all over the bedroom. It happens. Fortunately, he hasn’t had a die-hard urge to chew in awhile and this is something we feel he’s finally grown out of.

Thank goodness.

Rescue Rattery

This weeks TFM is entitled “Rescue Rattery” and, believe it or not, there is no exaggeration in this comic at all! A couple months after we moved to Austin, while a friend was visiting, we went and picked Nikki up from work to eat lunch with her. After lunch, we stopped by a pet store called Zookeeper to check out the cool reptiles they have there. Nikki loves snakes of all kinds and I’m particularly fond of leopard geckos and bearded dragons. We very seriously told ourselves before walking in that we were “JUST LOOKING” since we already had so many kids.

Of course, it being an exotics store, they also have mice and rats there to be sold as reptile food. It always makes us feel sad so we went to look at the baby rats. We bent down at a tank that was crawling with baby fancy rats and watched them play and tumble. We couldn’t stand the thought of them becoming food. A store associate came over and asked us if we wanted to see them. Against our better judgment, we said yes. Seriously, if you’ve ever seen a baby rat, you’ll know why we couldn’t resist. He opened the tank and we started pulling different babies out to play with them. The guy played with them too and as I watched him I said “He loves these babies too much, there’s no way he’d sell them as snake food.” At that, the guy jumped up and disappeared into the back. Nikki picked up an older boy rat who looked Himalayan and as she was playing with him, the man returned and set another older boy rat on her shoulder, this one brown. He told her he was going to be sold as snake food. I could see the thought in Nikki’s eyes and the man must have seen it too because he dashed off to the back again and returned with yet another boy rat, this one a Himalayan just like the first.

As he explained their story to us, we knew what we had to do. These three had been raised as pet rats, meaning they had been played with since they were young so they wouldn’t be hand shy. But they had never been bought and so the owner of the store had put them back with the feeder rats since they were “too old”. The employee who had helped raise them had kept sneaking them back up to the front, hoping they would be saved. I guess we were the bleeding hearts he’d been looking for and we knew that we couldn’t allow these sweet babies, raised to be companions, to become food simply because they were bigger and older than the babies. We couldn’t save just one either, so we took all three. The guy was so happy and told us that they liked to play “Tickle Butt”, where you chase them around with your hand and then tickle them and that if we “put them in a room with a disco ball and play some Diana Ross and they’ll be just FABULOUS!” Hehe. It was meant to be.

The friend who was visiting wanted a baby rat so she chose one from the tank, a pretty little fawn girl. Since we didn’t want her to be alone, Nikki & I ended up picking a gray hooded girl to keep her company. We named the brown boy TumTum, the twin Himalayans Toodles and Twinby, the fawn girl Artemis and the gray girl Athena. And that, my friends, is how on one lunch break, we ended up welcoming 5 more kids into our family! We wouldn’t change that day for the world!

Hey everyone! For those of you who attended BlogPaws, you know how hard it is to even begin to describe how amazing the conference was. For those of you who couldn’t make it this year, you NEED to go next year. It truly was a life changing experience for so many of those involved. You can’t imagine how energizing & inspiring & truly awesome the experience was! I know that there were so many incredible connections made and that there are months worth of stories to be told. This is one of ours and probably one of the most heartwarming of my entire life. This story is one that still makes me smile from ear to ear and makes Nikki tear up. I think it is one that perfectly describes the heart & soul of what BlogPaws is – animal lovers coming together to build an intentional community that will very truly change the lives of animals for the better! Keep in mind that Jo, Nikki & I met only about 10 minutes prior to this occurring! Without further ado, I give you our very own Nikki and Jo of EnlightenedFerret.com (@informedferret on twitter) with an awesome announcement:

So are you ready to run out to your nearest feral cat group and sign up? I hope so! Feral cats and strays in general are so misunderstood. If more people would realize that managing feral & stray populations in a humane way such as TNR is not only the right thing to do but also more effective than just killing them, the world would be a better place. If you can ever spare a few nights a month to go trap or take an extra 5 minutes on your way to work to make sure cats don’t go hungry that day, then please contact your local TNR group today! I promise you, the first time you look into the eyes of those appreciative cats, you’ll be hooked for life!

Also, if you would like to help these particular kitties, please help us to win $1000 from the Maddie’s Corner contest. All you have to do is either follow @MaddiesCorner on twitter & then tell them that @RescueAnimals sent you or you can fan Maddie’s Corner on Facebook and post on their wall that Ashley Niels from @RescueAnimals sent you. Super easy, right? We’re such a small group that the money would go a LONG way! Right now, all the food that feeds the over 300 cats we manage, is bought purely by the volunteers, most of all from our group’s founder. We would be incredibly blessed to win this money and would be forever grateful to you! You can find more information about the contest in our last post as well.

Mika safe and warm.

She is just one of the many cats we trapped this year with the Central Texas Feline Rescue. Every Tuesday night, Ash and I spend the evening with a bunch of traps, some tuna fish, and our quick wits in an attempt to catch feral/abandoned cats to get them spayed/neutered and rabies-vaccinated. Our goal this year was 300 – we hit 304. While Ash and I have only been doing this for several months (since we moved down here), we’re incredibly proud of ourselves for helping the cat community of Austin and the surrounding towns.

Mika here was a cat we caught last week. Last night we caught her again… twice. She was hungry enough that she didn’t even care how many times she got caught in that trap. Because of that, the volunteers took her in and our fearless leader Elizabeth is going to get her the rest of her shots and then we’ll be taking her in for a short time until we can find a more permanent home (be that a longer-term foster home or a forever home) for her. She’s beautiful and small and we couldn’t leave her out there in the cold so home she comes. We’ll see how she does.

Working with these cats is hard. They have hard lives and many times their stories are heartbreaking. The last few weeks, we’ve been trapping a colony of cats that came from a 14-cat household. The owners moved and abandoned all 14 cats to the streets, and now the owner of the park they currently call home is threatening to come in and kill them all. We spent the better part of last night canvasing that particular neighborhood, handing out literature on TNR and our group, and letting people know exactly what was going on. I was so wonderfully surprised by the reaction we got from people. More than one person praised what we were doing, thanked us for our time, and blessed us with hope in their eyes.

There is hope in the world. For Mika, there is hope tonight. She’s off the streets. Someday, we’ll get them all. There is hope.

UPDATE As of Christmas Eve 2009, Mika has a new home. She became the christmas present from a mother to a daughter. We’ve been getting regular updates and it seems that Mika has taken over the household as reigning queen. I am so happy and I hope her story inspires you to go out and foster. She is a lucky lucky kitten, and with your help, we can help more cats find happy forever homes.