Peaches, our new feral cat, was released from her captivity last Wednesday. Thursday morning arrived and her nocturnal activity could be traced in dead bodies. Presumably she is in a cat utopia, she returns every night to eat her dinner and use the litter tray!!
We looked after a cat last week, I’ll call it cuddles to protect its identity. Cuddles had been to the vet and required a urine sample to be collected, I can almost hear the laughter, but its not as difficult as you may think. First you get a clean litter tray, then you half fill it with tiny plastic beads, the cat pees in the beads and you have a clean sample. Cuddles wasn’t having any of it! Cuddles’ owner swears that cuddles adopted a cross legged position and refused to perform.
The owner had the idea of sprinkling a few wood litter pellets on top of the plastic beads to encourage use of the tray so I duly placed the tray in position and checked regularly. Next morning at 8.0am the tray was still completely dry but cuddles had eaten and drank as usual so I looked in again at 9.0am to find, joy of joys, a distinctly disturbed litter tray, the sort you know they have put their heart and soul into scraping every bit of litter to cover their toilet. I whipped the tray away smartly, it wouldn’t do to get the urine contaminated with solid waste, and tipped the tray to collect the sample in the corner. Nothing happened! Their was a large amount of pee in the tray. the white plastic balls had a yellow appearance, there was a strong whiff of cat pee but the few wood litter pellets had completely absorbed the excess.
There was only one thing for it, I had to separate the plastic beads from the wood litter which was now just a brown mush. I filled a bucket with hot disinfectant and scraped everything into it, gave it a good stir and let it settle. The beads all floated on the top, nice and clean. I was busy scooping them back into a clean tray when my Son came to see what I was doing, “wouldn’t that be easier with a sieve” he said helpfully. “If you don’t mind the kitchen sieve being lightly coated in cat’s pee and disinfectant”, I replied. He saw the downside to that.
The newly cleaned, rinsed and dried beads were put back with cuddles and next morning we had success.
On the chicken front, we had a good hatching session with eight live chicks. There were nine but the very first one to hatch only lived for an hour, it did look a bit anaemic. Two duck eggs are due to hatch on Wednesday.
We had a great training session with the alpacas last Friday, it was sort of alpaca whispering and we feel more confident about handling them now. Minnie is due to give birth in May and Pela is due in July, that should be fun.
Joy
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