Feeding, health checking and admitting cats

Staff training day

Today all of the Cat Care Assistants took part in a training day. Dawn Gibson the training officer for Cats Protection came to the centre to observe and train the staff. We were instructed on feeding the cats, cleaning out the cat pens and how to thoroughly health check and admit a cat.

Although most of the staff are very experienced it is always beneficial to have a refresh on these important aspects of the job. Some cats require different dietary needs due to health problems and depending on the age of the cat they also need to be fed the correct food. The separate sections of the adoption centre require different cleaning routines. High risk areas like maternity and isolation units have to be 'barrier' cleaned. This means that protective clothing like gloves, aprons, shoe covers and arm sleeves need to be changed between each pen when we are cleaning.

Health checking a cat when it first arrives at the adoption centre is extremely important. During health checks any health issues like possible cat flu or ringworm can be detected straight away and the cat can be isolated to prevent the problem from spreading to other cats. When we health check the cats we have to look inside the cats mouth, inside the cats ears, we check the cats eyes, nose, body, tail, claws, joints, skin and coat condition. We also check the sex of the cat, weigh the cat, scan for a microchip and perform a wood lamp test for ringworm. Many different things can be observed from these health checks and if we for example find the the cat has fleas, ticks, lice or ear mites we can administer the correct treatment for the problem.

Bath time for Alice

Today we had to give Alice one of our a beautiful kittens a bath. Surprisingly Alice rather enjoyed being towelled down at the end to dry her off. We took a video of this earlier and thought we would share it with everyone on here. She put her legs up in the air and started purring. If only all cats were this well behaved at bath time, it would make our lives a lot easier.