About Me and My Mission

I found my first litter of feral kittens on the family farm when I was about seven years old. We had some old dilapidated duck sheds down the hill of what was then a seven acre property. My sister, cousin and I use to claim the duck sheds as cubby houses and play in them. We'd plant vegetable gardens on the outside and put old play furniture on the inside, then take tea and biscuits on tables draped with red and white checked table cloths. 

One cold winter day I walked down the hill by myself and heard a tiny meow. When I followed it to its source I found a dead mother cat and four tiny kittens – three were dead and one was alive. I grabbed the live one and bundled him into my cardigan and ran up that hill as fast as I could to our house. My mother promptly put him in a warm box. We tried to feed him but he didn't respond. It was evening by then, and during the 1960s there were no after-hour vets available so we couldn't get any emergency care for him. By morning he was dead and I was absolutely devastated. My father later told me after he had buried the entire cat family that he thought they were victim of a dog attack.

I have always had an instinctive understanding of cats. It was me that found all the strays and won them over. For some reason I innately knew what they needed and how to communicate with them, but I found that there was a distinct behavioural differences between dumped or stray animals that were frightened but had been socialised, and those second or third generation cats born into wild feral cat families. After all – the latter group see us as predators.

I lived in the city for a number of years and came back to the country in 2003 to find the farm populated by many feral cats. My family had been exceedingly kind and had fed them daily, but they didn't know how to manage them outside of that.

The memory of that little dead kitten and his short life has stayed with me a long time, and during the last few years I decided to learn how to take care of feral cats. It was actually sort of thrust upon me but that is another story for another time.

I now have 20 cats I look after – three of them are strays, eight of them are socialised feral cats, and the rest are still feral but friendly and a definite part of our extended family. I would like to bring you their stories in this blog (and an upcoming website) and much of the information I have learned through trial and error to find out what works in caring for them and managing their numbers.

I have implemented an active strategy on how to feed, take care of them, socialise them and find good homes for them. I will be sharing my tips with you on how to economise on food, how to trap them to get them desexed (or spayed as it is known in other countries around the world), how to build relationships with your vet or animal welfare agency, and how to find like-minded people who will love and adore them as much as I do and I know you do.

So g'day from Australia, and please come and visit this blog regularly and interact with others if you want to save these wonderful wonderful creatures from starvation, being terrorised and abused because ultimately they just want what we want – food, warmth and shelter, safety and to be loved.