Updates and miscellaneous ramblings...

The B's will be going to a foster to adopt home after finishing quarantine.  They were vetted last week but still need one more FVRCP+FeLV vaccination (booster) in three weeks.  After the last booster, they can be adopted.

Odessa (the little spitfire black kitten) is doing great.  She's a little cutie and has great potential to be a huge lovebug.  She's FeLV/FIV negative but too young to be spayed.  She received her first vaccination today (treated for fleas, intestinal parasites yesterday).

Little girl Siamese mix is doing great.  She is negative for FeLV/FIV and will be spayed this week.I have got to figure out a name for her, and find her a foster home. 

Jasper, the big Siamese tom, went to the vet today.  First step is testing.  Vet called, he is FIV positive according to the SNAP test. She did the rest of his vetting and I called his foster home to see if they would still take him.  Thankfully the answer was yes otherwise I would've been scrambling to find another foster home.  Since he was positive on the SNAP test, we'll send out his blood for a Western Blot test to confirm that he actually is FIV positive.  If he is positive, it may take longer to find a good home for him, but he's in a great foster home and will receive love and attention until he is adopted. 

FIV is not the big bad scary disease it was thought to be for many years.  I personally have an FIV positive cat.  Maddie is an extremely shy, semi-feral black cat that came to live with me about a year ago -- Maddie loves snuggling up with my cats and she almost let me touch her now. I knew she was FIV when I took her in. I had done a lot of research on the subject because of volunteering at a no-kill shelter that had FIV positive cats and I was considering adopting one. 

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people say FIV is like feline AIDS because it creates a stigma.  It's this stigma that leads FIV positive cats to take longer to adopt than FIV negative cats.  FIV does not lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in cats as often as HIV leads to AIDS in people.  Many people still believe it's highly contagious (it's not) and that cats will have a very short livespan with FIV (that's not true, they can live long healthy lives).  FIV cannot be spread from one species to another.  FIV is relatively hard to transmit, the most common forms of transmission are through severe bit wounds or throgh an infected mother cat to giving birth to kittens.  Most FIV+ cats could be adopted and live with FIV-negative cats with very little risk of transmitting the disease. Because FIV is most commonly transmitted through bite wounds, a non-aggressive FIV+ cat would not put other cats at risk.