She plies her trade in America. Her name is Kay Banks. She is the owner of Tabby Tails Cat Rescue. She’s on TikTok and appears to be working alone in taking cats from cat shelters who are happy for her to have them. There are too many. They are being killing them on a regular basis. Nathan Winograd would have a field day with the shelters with which she works. Too much killing. Not enough adoptions. Not enough imaginative commitment to finding ways to save lives, he’d say.
She operates as a spillover cat rescuer. But she is taking in too many cats which leaves her exhausted and barely able to cope. I think she is heading for cat rescue burn out. She works at the shit end of cat rescue as she describes it where many cats are being euthanised as there is insufficient room at the shelter.
She implied that some shelters put down adult cats that are not pregnant but keep alive pregnant females who are given to the shelter as they can produce kittens which are more adoptable. I presume that the mother is then put down.
She says that these females should be spayed and an abortion performed at the same time.
She has a successful TikTok account because she has over 1.9 million followers. I can see why. She is very open about her travails and difficulties. She works very hard and is struggling it seems to me. This is because for the animal shelters she works with in the area where she works there are too many cats coming into the shelters and therefore, they are euthanised unless she pulls them out and saves their lives.
In the video she says that she is about to take in three pregnant cats. That means the adult cats plus the kittens inside them. And that, to her means that she is going to have to pay for a veterinarian to perform a spraying operation in combination with an abortion. I think she describes this as a ‘spay-abort’. And she justifies it for the obvious reason that it stops kittens being brought into the world and also the death of these kittens will be peaceful she says.
The amount of money she needs to run her rescue is extraordinary. Just for the cats taken in recently she says that she’ll need US$5,200. She must have a very good fundraising regime. She is particularly exhausted in the video because she had just taken in 31 new rescues many of which were starving to death.
And she spends all night bottle-feeding kittens as has happened over the last couple of days from the date of the video. In order to bottle feed properly she has to be up every four hours to feed the kittens. And this is not out of the norm for her rescue work.
In another revelation she says that she knows of a cat rescuer who smuggles cats out of a Kentucky cat shelter and hides them in a shed in order to save their lives. Extraordinary. It sounds as if it is Armageddon in Kentucky if you are stray cat or kitten.
At the time she made the video she had 172 cats and kittens under her care. We do not see a facility but we do see a pile of cats all very close together in a photograph on a news media website. She operates a shelter where cats can roam freely which means they aren’t in cages. And unsurprisingly she constantly needs donations of all the products that you need to run this kind shelter properly which is food, litter, money, veterinary services and so on and so forth.
In terms of energy and persistence and commitment this woman is amazing. But you wonder how long she can last and when cat rescue burnout will kick in and she will have had enough.
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