Pets in Italy

URGENT!! Can You Help a Pregnant Little Cat?

Central Italy  - Tuscany /Umbria area

Can you help give a home or foster home to a lovely little cat APRILE who is very pregnant, kittens due in three weeks. She is currently being taken care of by Cristina who found her straying. Cristina lives in a small apartment with her own cat Catpuchino, and is just about to move to another apartment. She is at her wits' end as no-one seems to be able to help her. Can you?

She writes: "If I had a larger apartment or a shed for protection, I would make her a comfortable home. If I can't home her, I will have to put her and the kittens in the bathroom, which I fear will be stressful for her and Catpuccino, but we will all cope. 

"Aprile is more of a people cat than my own Catpuccino. She loves to be petted and to sleep on the couch. She stays outdoors most of the time now, though, since it is warm. She eats dry and wet food. 

"In my heart, I want her to have a home with someone who will love her and let her live indoors and out. Someone did offer to put her in a shed to catch mice, but she is not feral or one to live totally outdoors. I don't know where she came from, but she has never gone back. She's a people cat... and so I want a home for her that is more than outdoors on her own. "Perhaps there could be a foster home for her, where someone could care for her with the kittens, and then find homes for them. She will need to be spayed, too. "

Please contact Cristina by email: christinecovelli@gmail.com 

 

URGENT!! Can You Foster Barnaby the Little Bichon?

This is an urgent plea from Bethany in the UK who saved a puppy from Syria. Barnaby is a three-year-old 9kg Bichon and, as she says, “ a lovely, friendly and loveable dog.” Bethany took Barnaby to Italy where he lived with her and then she left him with her cousin who lives between Piedmont and Lombardy. Now Bethany’s cousin has said she won’t keep him any longer. He can’t go to the UK as his vaccinations are not ready so we are looking for a FOSTER HOME until October or a PERMANENT HOME. Please can you help?

Here is the email from Bethany: 
“Barnaby is a perfect companion for anyone. He loves people and is very affectionate. He is also really good with other dogs, gets on well with them and plays immediately. He is an independent soul, but responds well to cheese and enforced boundaries. He is used to being washed and combed so this presents no difficulty - he loves warm water, actually. He is rewarded for good behaviour during grooming with small tidbits of cheese. 

“He has had all his vaccinations (rabies & he is having a booster for this this or next week and I forget the names of the others) and these are all recorded in his pet vaccinations book. He has been regularly wormed and has been given the medicine that my cousin tells me dogs in Italy have to have between May and September. He is not neutered. He is also micro-chipped and has a pet passport. He will be 3 years old in June. 

"He is a Bichon, but has blue eyes and a pink nose (but he is not albino as he has a very light characteristic apricot blush on his ear and near his back legs which Bichons often have. I think he is a pure breed dog, but I am 100% sure. He is longer than the typical Bichon, but his personality is apparently very consistent with the breed as are his other physical features. He knows commands such as sit and stay. He is house trained and when he was living with me, got a morning and an evening walk. I lived with him in a flat with a large balcony and a house with a roof garden and he was fine in both those situations. Now, he lives with my cousin's other dog (an Alsatian) in the garden of her family's house. 

"Barnaby needs to be re-homed or fostered immediately. I think it would be possible for Barnaby to travel - it would depend on the region. Certainly I could deliver him to a family in the north and as far as Tuscany, if it meant he was going to a good home). If he was with a foster family, I would of course be willing to cover food costs and medicine etc but these would have to be agreed in advance. Also, if anything serious happened to Barnaby while he was in foster care, we would have to assess at that juncture what would be best for him.”

PLEASE CONTACT bethanyrandell@googlemail.com

Something Nasty in the Woodshed

Well I spent Sunday doing a makeover of the downstairs kitchen. Alan was away in Modena meeting up with his old Motoclub friends and so I thought I'd take the chance to move things around a bit. 

In mid Changing Rooms trance, I suddenly realised I hadn't heard our English Setter Gassie for about an hour and a half since letting him into the garden. He's normally very vocal and comes and goes while the other two dogs sit patiently and watch his antics. This time there was a suspicious silence but when I called him he came inside wagging his tail. All was well, or so I thought.

This morning as I passed by the lean-to we have next to the garage I saw why he'd been so quiet. During one of his obsessive lizard hunts he had managed to rip apart about ten plastic bags of carefully stored woodpellets for our pellet stove as he tried to catch his prey!It was total mayhem in there.

It took me about three hours to tape together the broken bags and to collect up the loose pellets. I Googled what to do with spoiled wood pellets as they turn into sawdust at the slightest touch of damp and weigh a ton. There was surprisingly little on the Internet apart from the fact they make great cat litter or horse bedding, but as I don't have a horse (yet) and the amount on the ground would have kept a colony of 100 cats happy for weeks, I decided to compost them. Back and forth I went for it seemed like hours and then tried to mix it in as best I could and hope the rather surprised worms liked sawdust.

Ironic really as I was just telling Alan how well we had done to have so many bags left over from this winter.  I did reflect on the sweet irony of phrase which had captured my heart when I read the appeal for poor abandoned Gassie on the internet. It went along the lines of 'All he wants to do is sit by the fireside and rest his head on your slippers.'  It didn't mention there would be no fire in the fireside stove as the dog would have flung the fuel to the four winds in his mad hunt for reptiles. Oh well. I still love him to pieces despite his funny habits and you never know, pellets might make great compost.

 

 

 

 

Not Only Puppies Need Help

Did my stint at the kennels (dog pound for US readers) on Sunday. May 1 but no day off on Monday for Italians as if a bank holiday falls on a weekend - tough luck!

There are two tiny puppies that have just arrived, absolutley adorable. One has already found a home (the male) and so they are looking fora home for the brown and white female. I don't think it will be long as puppies usually go quite quickly.

How cute is that? I am very tenpted myself, but really think that if we ever take on another dog it would have to be an older one - you know the mid age, mid size type that no-one looks at.

One of the canile dogs is very ill. Marlene, a beautiful alsation type is not eating and has lost a ton of weight. The vet has sent off her samples for 'analisi' but as she has a lot of lumps and bumps things don't look that bright for her.

I've seen about six dogs now die in the canile, from old age or from consitions they had when they came in. I am sure that the love shown by the volunteers makes up in a small way for the hell some of them have been through but if I could get my hands on some of the people who treat a dog as though it is a piece of rubbish...well, I'm sure you know the rest.

I picked up a copy of a free magazine the other day for the Arezzo area and it had a whole page devoted to a new association I hadn't heard of before. I checked out their page and they seem to be doing good work under very hard circumstances in Sardinia, where a lot of dogs have a very tough time indeed. They are called associazioneliberitutti so do give the site a visit. It's all in Italian, but the dogs speak an international language.

I would urge anyone thinking about getting a puppy to consider an older abandoned dog as some of the stories and the life they have had is just horrendous. As I always try and remind myself, the problem is huge but if you help just one dog then 'it makes a difference to that one'.