Mischa's Tale - so many lives lost

Just looking at this picture moves me to get those watery precipitations from the eyes that all men fear - being labelled as sentimental softies. Well, I am guilty as charged. Beatrice, the larger older cat on the left, was one of our rescues. She is no longer with us and I will save that story for another day. She adopted an orphan foundling, Mischa, and brought him up.Or rather he adopted her... She wasn't at all keen at first but his persistence paid off. By creeping into her arms when she was asleep he eventually got Beatrice to accept him as her son. She doted on him and played with him in the garden long after he had grown up.

This was the picture we took on his first day with us. Unlike most street kittens, who are deeply suspicious of humans, Mischa loved us from the start. In fact he adopted us in the most charming of ways. My wife was returning from the supermarket with a friend. She opened the car door and Mischa sprang through the open door onto her lap. A pleasant surprise indeed. My wife felt his tummy and found it to be rock hard - a sign of acute constipation which is usually caused by a chronic worm infestation.An infestation like this will kill a young animal and so she brought him home and that's when we took the picture.

Several worm treatments and a few drops of olive oil in his food cleared the problem. A worm the length of a large man's hand eventually emerged. This was not to be the end of his troubles, however. At about nine months old Mischa became very ill. Vomiting. Wouldn't eat. Sleeping all the time. Distressed. His illness was the third case of the mystery sickness we had had. One, a beautiful cat called Harry, died while getting an IV drip on the vet's treatment table. I pleaded with him to come back but he was dead. He was a handsome animal and both the vet and I wept after we gave up trying to resuscitate him. I buried him in the garden and it was a long time before I could return home. So when Mischa developed the same symptoms and began to decline I was devastated - he was my boy and he loved me. I knew what was coming.

Again there was the terrible crisis on the treatment table. He stopped breathing, went into convulsions and defacated - it was the moment of death. The faeces was green slime. At that moment the vet remained cool and said, 'I have seen this before.' She calmly prepared a syringe of cortisone and injected it into the shunt while giving him heart massage. Again I called to the cat to come back and that we loved him. This time it worked! The power of love ? She injected medicine against the amoebic infection she had diagnosed and I rushed to the pharmacy to get some Flagyl - a very effective medicine against this kind of disease. Can you imagine ? Within two hours of being 'dead' Mischa was at the door wanting to go out into the garden so he could play with his friends.

A few months later Mischa disappeared from view and after 12 hours I went hunting. I spent hours searching for him and against all hope I found him cowering in a hedge being tormented by a psychotic, fully grown, sadistic tom cat. After I got him home it was clear he had been badly injured. He was dragging his leg. The wonderful vets we work with diagnosed a broken hip - he'd been in a traffic accident. An operation in which the ball of his thigh bone where it connect to his hip is partially removed (Hip Excision Osteoplasty) followed. The next week was filled with despair. After the operation he was paraplegic and our thoughts were of having him put to sleep. The vets insisted he would be fine and we grudgingly went along with their prognosis. As soon as his wound had healed they started him on cortisone and vitamin B which is very effective against nerve damage.. It worked. Within four weeks he was climbing trees in the garden.

It is often said that cats have nine lives (some cultures venture seven) - well Mischa has used up three of his for sure. He is well established in our garden and comes home for visits every now and again when we want to spoil him.

Ugur (means 'Horizon' in Turkish) - our rescued Persian

Our rescued Persian cat Ugur tried to starve himself to death because he misses his two dads who went to England. After much experimentation we found something that stopped his hunger strike - baby Norwegian salmon, lightly killed to death by bathing them in a golden cup of unicorn tears, freshly tinned by elves wearing gloves made of troll hair - finally the tins fashioned from Einsteinium are flown in by helicopter and delivered to the end customer by winch. The moggy liked this so much that we bought a crate that was on special offer aaaaaaaaaand.... wait for it.... he's bloody allergic to fish we have now discovered. 

I want to kill him.

Battling against ignorance

Why this country (Turkey) is going down the pan through blind ignorance and religious stupidity....

On the CHP (Republican People's Party) page (allegedly the party of the more educated secular left) a dimwit declares that one unspeyed female cat will give birth to six kits and these animals will create a further 42 offspring before one year has elapsed. The extrapolation went further with hundreds of cats resulting.

That's the first bullshit. The average litter for malnourished mothers is 3 but let's say 4 for the sake of argument. Not all of them will survive and indeed it's our experience that even with our help (good food and vet visits) only one or two on average will survive the first year (cars and predators get most of them in the end). But let's say two. The second piece of BS is that the OP implies all offspring will be females. Duh! So even in the best case scenario one cat gives birth to three females and they produce a further 12 making 18. The reality is that the figure is more likely to be around a total of 6. But many expats here go to great efforts to spay them all because we want cats to be a cherished rarity and not a nuisance.

Here is where it all gets really interesting. When my wife pointed all this out to them the comments were bizarre. One poster worried that cats would become extinct. Others (far too many) said that spaying was murdering the unborn. Others said it was against Allah's will and spayers would go to hell. Not one of these fuckers would lift a finger to help street animals but suddenly they are all experts and concerned about cats.

I despair.

A story from the present day during our lives as cat rescuers.

This is Max whom I found curled up to die in a bush by a restaurant in Kusadasi, Turkey. I took him to the vet and eventually he had to have his eye removed. He has been the victim of unbelievable cruelty. Someone had thrown a rock at him.



He had already been spotted by several more cat people. The story is told by Abigail Mary Johnston.


Two days into our holiday, we were all on our way out one morning when I saw a little kitten with its back to me. Now normally I wouldn't really walk over to it unless I could see mama, but I walked slowly, waited for it to turn around and knelt down to get a look at it.

That's when I got a look at its eye.

I at first assumed it had a really severe case of conjunctivitis and had had it for a while, because this eye looked SO BAD. So, I alerted my friends and the next day, there was the little cutie underneath the same bush, not far from mum.

My friend Sarah reached out and got hold of it and she believed it had a virus that was going around and with her family around, they believed the diagnosis also.
Because we didn't have anything to put the cat in at that time, they applied the medicine that they had on them, directly on this eye and then, put it back with mum for the time being. My friend would later describe the eye as 'Rock hard'.

The next morning, we searched high and low for this kitten. Nowhere to be found. We asked the bar staff and hotel staff to look for it with us and keep an eye out. We kept a cat basket in our room. We also tried playing kitten noises to the mother in hopes she may lead us to her baby.
But no luck. We were all starting to feel a little bit down and obviously, suspected the worse.

On the Third day of looking, we went to a wonderful meeting for 'Paws and Claws' in Kusadasi, a fantastic group for people who help out one another looking after the street cats and dogs.
We were sitting there, during the meeting, calmly discussing whatever we could think of, when suddenly, our friend ran up to us.

The Kitten had been found.

Two days ago.

Turns out, this fantastic guy had been looking for a cat he was after and had stumbled across our little, 'Blinkin' and taken her home. He to had taken care of her when he noticed discharge coming from her eye, which turned out to be her eyeball. She was taken in for an operation and had the eye removed, but was doing very well.

We were so happy to know that at the least, she was going to be ok.
A massive thanks to Greg for finding her and looking after her, you're brilliant at what you're doing!
And 'Blinkin' is now known as Max, which is a much better name!

Welcome to Raining Cats and Dogs - true inspirational stories that will melt and break your heart

This is our original crew. Their mother brought them to our doorstep on our first day here in Turkey. The picture shows them at about six months old (left to right - Whisky, Blackie, Ginger). Not very original names I know but in those days we weren't really cat people.

Little did we know that these three were to change our lives so much. Today we spend most of our time and all of our spare cash on street cat welfare here in Turkey. Below is their lair in some bushes outside our new home near Davutlar when they were just six weeks old (estimated).

As Winter drew in and the holidaymakers left their holiday homes it gradually began to dawn on us that if we didn't take them to our new permanent home in Kusadasi then they would starve. As Europeans one just doesn't come across these dilemmas that often. So we packed them in a cardboard box and took them with us some two months after the above picture was taken. We now know that mum would have abandoned them anyway at around that time. We tried to take mum with us. She didn't like that idea at all. She was probably an abandoned house cat rather than a hardcore street cat and had a bit of class. She would never enter the house unless invited and would wait patiently to be asked in. We now realise Pussy was special. She was a fantastic mum who held her kits down by their shoulders to keep their faces clean and showed them how to climb trees. The memory of leaving her behind to her fate is still painful some three years later.