Out here in the jungles of Krabi, there are a lot of animals that kind of live off the land. These are dogs and cats that never had owners and their parents probably didn't either. They subsist by living far enough away from populations, normally on farms, that they don't become too much of a nuisance for the humans that live there. They tend to not have much interaction with humans at all in their lives and therefore approaching them can be somewhat complicated and perhaps even dangerous for us and them.
We have a series of traps to assist in catching them, all of which are custom made because this is Thailand, and we don't exactly have access to the manufacturers of just anything.
Here are some of the unnamed animals that we brought in for treatment recently and i'll briefly explain how it all works.
These "snap traps" are often used on farms in the west for the trapping of raccoons or skunks, which can be problematic to farmers in that part of the world. cats are about the same size so the system is the same. Something that they would like to eat it places inside hanging on a hook that in order to get the food off of it, they must pull on the food if it is attached properly. With the requisite force applied, the hook moves and the supporting metal stick that is holding the door in the upright position releases, and then a rather simplistic locking mechanism holds the door shut.
With traps like these it is extremely important that the traps are checked every single day, especially if they are put in an area that could be hit by sunshine. The animal inside cannot get out and if left unchecked they will slowly suffer and die in there the same way that you would if you were placed in a cage in the sun for days at a time. It would be a truly awful way to die.
We check every day, which I think is kind of needless to say. Sometimes we check more often than that. We had tried in the past to have some sort of communication device that would alert us to the trap closing and these sorts of things do exist in the west, but they are well beyond our budget so we just use our eyes and our motorbikes to check on them.
But the animals we were aiming to capture for treatment were all caught, so this is a good thing.
They aren't really happy about being captured though, as I am sure you can imagine so we do not attempt to handle the animals ourselves and are very careful with how we so much as pick up the container. There is a handle on top there, but that wily cat is more than capable of reaching through with those razor claws and hurting you. Nothing that some gardening gloves can't handle though.
At the vet's office they normally have to sedate the animal so they can treat them. Then they do blood tests and apply the appropriate cures, and also sterilize the animals.
Why do we do this if they aren't bothering anyone? That is the main question we get. Well this is because the farmers that work this land regularly find groups of mewing kittens one day, pet them, feed them if they have anything the kittens can eat, then they come back a few weeks later to find them all in a pile starved to death. The mothers in this area are having babies and abandoning them. They never even have a chance at life. We do NOT have the capacity to endlessly re-home the kittens out here since our adoptions are at an all time low, so we do the next best thing that we can. Capture and sterilize the adult females.
We return them after treatment to exactly where we found them so that they can go about their lives. These cats are too close to feral to even consider adoption and seeing as how we have so many appropriate-attitude cats available for adoption already, this isn't something that we would even attempt anyway.
One thing that I have noticed when dealing with the rural cats, who are in much lower numbers than their urban counterparts is that while they do have higher levels of ticks, they have fewer levels of all other parasites and a near complete absence of any sort of cancer.
I think this goes to show that these diseases very well could be the result of overpopulation not just of felines, but of the world in general. Since these cats live life in an area where they rarely encounter any other animals other than perhaps the males who can smell them from miles away, they do not have the opportunity to spread disease from one animal to the next. I am not talking sheer numbers here because obviously the middle of the jungle has fewer cats than the city center... I am talking about the percentages. There is virtually a complete absence of bloodborne diseases in the wild where it is so common in the urban areas that we can all but assume that there is going to be a problem when we pick up a stray in the city.
This doesn't mean that we are keen on them abandoning their young though.
Others have said something uninformed such as we are interrupting the ecosystem by disallowing offspring and no, no we are not. We are only sterilizing problematic animals in the wild, there are almost certainly many many more that we are not even aware they are even there. They probably do hold down a certain part of the ecosystem such as elimination of mice and rats, and they will continue to do so. If anyone has upset the ecosystem, it is the humans. But we all have to eat and therefore we need farms.
We do not seek to eliminate suffering, because that simply isn't possible. We seek to reduce it as much as we possibly can. This is what we strive for and what we have been working on, and will continue working on, for nearly a decade now.
If you would like to see how you can help out or simply spread the word, please visit our website at
http://krabianimalwelfare.org
Krabi Animal Welfare is a charity run entirely by volunteers and are a registered non-profit organization in Thailand and the U.K.. We aim to relieve the pain and suffering of dogs and cats within Krabi Province.
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