Empty Nesting

Well, for the first time in months I am completely without a foster kitten. Poppet and Popoki are at the adoption center waiting for their forever homes. Shamy got neutered on Wednesday and he just needed one more set of x-rays before he would be ready for adoption. That is it! It is nice to have my bathroom (aka the foster room) back and its nice not to have to step over a baby gate every time I have to pee. But I feel like something is missing still.

My cats are so happy to have the bathroom back. Spyrit has been sleeping in the bathroom sink to stay cool every night this week. He likes to drink from it also and will run into the bathroom to remind you to turn it on. Everyone else seems happy but I think Godzilla is a little lonely. He has been so freaking needy since the babies went away.

Mike couldn't be more thrilled to not have fosters in the house. He hates the baby gate and he says it makes him feel bad when we have kittens quarantined in the bathroom. I told him that the bathroom is a lot bigger than a cage at the shelter but he doesn't get it. He doesn't look at those little faces every day. He is also really afraid now of taking anyone home from the shelter because of how much Panleuk is spreading over there. I can understand that, so I am giving him his time off.

Speaking of understanding the Panleuk problem, I have a much better insight into where it is all coming from now. On Wednesday morning I was sent to Chicago Animal Care and Control to help with cleaning. Apparently they had "no caregivers" that day and my shelter decided to zip in and help them out. As a reminder, I work for the city's largest no-kill shelter and Chicago Animal Care and Control (CACC) is the city pound and largest pet killer in the city. So it should come as no surprise to learn that I was not very happy about the arrangements made Wednesday afternoon, but since it was only for a few hours I figured I would just endure. Well, it was the worst three hours I have ever worked.

The conditions there are less than ideal, and in CACC's defense they ARE taking in all the strays in the city. I just was not ready for what they threw at me. I was handed a bucket of supposed "pure undiluted bleach" and told to clean cages with it. Well the first problem was that in order for bleach to be effective you need to use a detergent to scrub the cages, otherwise you just have poop with bleach on it. The other problem was that the bleach did not smell like anything at all which means that it was either expired or not an effective disinfectant. Did you know that bleach can go bad? It can. Bleach can expire from old age or being left in a transparent container (did you ever notice that true bleach always comes in an opaque bottle?) and when it goes bad the chlorine smell disappears. Luckily I managed to find some Trifectant (a cleaning product that we use at my shelter which kills all major diseases with the exception of ringworm) and clean properly. I don't care that I didn't do what they told me, I did it the right way.

The lack of proper cleaning tools was my first problem. The second problem was that they wanted me to clean cages with the animal STILL IN THE CAGE. Which means I am using "pure undiluted bleach" while kitty is sitting in the cage staring at me. Yeah, that did not fly at all. My co-worker and I took turns holding the cats as best we could while we cleaned their cages. Did I mention that the tools we were given to clean with were only paper towels? Well I snuck around until I found rags and sponges and did the best I could. The garbage cans were overflowing and the the only soap I could find to do dishes with was hand soap.

Then I was instructed to clean an empty bank of cages. They had a panleuk outbreak in one bank of cages and there were tags on the cages that said "Panleuk 7/10". The cages were empty of animals but still set up as if they had just taken the animals out. What really happened? They euthanized all of the cats in that bank when they found panleuk on 7/10 which was THREE DAYS prior to my being there. Those cages sat there, some of them with feces and vomit sitting for THREE FUCKING DAYS. And you can go ahead and guess what I was given to clean with... That's right! Paper towels and "pure undiluted bleach". Once again I begged borrowed and stole supplies from different parts of the shelter until I could clean that bank properly. It is so important that an area like that gets cleaned properly because they see such a high volume of animals that in a few days they will be putting cats and kittens back into that bank of cages. If they cages were not disinfected properly then there was no point in cleaning them in the first place! You are just dooming those animals.

I did not have to work with the dogs but my co-worker did and she said it was awful. They spray the cages down while the dog is still inside and there were a couple dogs that were obviously sick with Parvo which is a very deadly disease for dogs. When she approached the "vet" about the dogs he was first angered to be disturbed on his lunch and then proceeded to give her a bullshit excuse and not do anything to help the dogs. The worst part of the day was when I got back and one of our vet techs (who had been at CACC just the day before) asked me if CACC still had kittens and cats stacked in carriers with no litter boxes in the hallway. I was happy to say no until I realized just why there was no cats or kittens stacked in carriers... they must have all been killed. 

I'm just glad I was able to take a lesson away from it. That three hours made me really understand just how important my organization is because we take animals directly from CACC to try and help reduce the euthanasia rate. I don't want any animals to have to sit in that hell hole, so I have to keep working my hardest at my job to help get animals out! Fostering helps in that area as well because if I take kittens from my shelter that frees up a cage for us to pull more kittens from CACC. I have been having a hard time with work lately and as much as Wedneday sucked I am really glad to have had a reminder of how important my job is. I was also able to talk to some of the higher ups at my shelter and explain to them the awful conditions at CACC. My manager asked me to write up a detailed report of my experiences there so that we can approach them directly about their unsanitary conditions. Hopefully we can make a difference.