For those of you who do not follow the CCS Facebook page, the following are excerpts of postings regarding the situation the shelter is currently facing.
At the bottom of this post is a link to the local news story that recently aired.
Posted June 2:
One of our cats, Gatsby had a lesion so he was brought to the FM Animal Hospital to be diagnosed, and to our dismay, we were told that it looks suspicious of the dreaded Ringworm. We will not have a conclusive diagnosis for 7 to 10 days, that is how long the culture must grow to know for certain, however, we were in no way going to take any changes and decided to be proactive and treat every cat in the shelter, clean the shelter with bleach from the ceiling tiles down to the floor, we had to discard all items that could not be completely sterilized from carpeted cat trees (7 of them), toys, some of the older beds, rugs, even our beloved “DaBird” toys that the cats love so very much. We will even have to toss out our vacuum cleaner when this is over. It is in our shelter protocol to limit access to the shelter for the time being. This is to try and protect those cats that have not been exposed.
We will be contacting all of our adoptions from the month of May over this next week and asking them to please take a close look at their cats, dogs and humans for lesions that look like this.
If you are one of our adoptive parents and suspect you’re your cat may have been exposed please contact us at 701-356-7877 and leave a message, we will get back to you to give you instructions on what to do next. This may help us save time making calls and allow us to focus on the task of our daily sanitizing.
I know many of you watch our wish list and like to send us gifts for the kitties, but as of now our biggest need is money to replace all that had to be thrown out. We will need 6 tiered Kuranda beds to replace the carpeted cat trees. We have decided that Kuranda beds are much more shelter friendly and are so much easier to clean, and none of the Kuranda beds needed to be thrown out, just sterilized with bleach after being cleaned with soap and water.
For those of you who have never heard about ringworm, it is a “spore” not a worm. Cats can be carriers of ringworm and never ever show a symptom, but even though they are not infected they can still shed the spores. We do not know where this came from, and frankly at this point it really does not matter. What DOES matter is that we are addressing the situation head on and proactively doing everything we can to maintain a healthy shelter. Anyone who has visited us at the Cradle can attest to how well cared for the cats are and how clean the shelter is. That is not about to change now.
Posted June 3:
Due to our current situation, CATS Cradle Shelter will be suspending our Tuesday June 4th and Saturday June 8th open house adoption events. We are waiting for definitive conformation on the culture that was done on Gatsby. We are being pro-active in treating all cats on site whether they are symptomatic or not.
If you are interested in a particular cat that you have seen on Petfinder or our websites, or if you are interested in one of our kittens who are in foster homes, please call 701-356-7877 and arrangements can be made for a meeting. In the meantime, The Humane Society Fargo Moorhead has many wonderful adult cats available for adoption. We need to stress that adoptions are critical in making room to save more lives. The Humane Society will be helping us out by taking pound cats in. Both organizations are in need of foster homes that are set up with the ability to isolate their foster cat through its initial 7 day worming period.
If interested, please copy the link below for the news story that recently aired.
