Mara Mobile Veterinary Unit

Category: Cats | Date: Mar 14 2007 | By: admin

Today was a long day. I vaccinated dogs in several bomas all morning followed by deworming 200 sheeps and making blood smears from 50 cattle. At miday, my car broke and I had to drive back to garage in Kichwa Tembo. I drove over a rock and it broke off the exhaust pipe so it had to be welded back.

In the evening, I went to Kichwa Tembo to set up a cat trap. There are lots of domestic cats living near the hotels within the reserve due to easily available food scraps from the kitchen area. I suspect that they originated from Maasai boma around the reserve and migrated to the lodges. There are almost twenty cats inside Kichwa Tembo, killing small rodents and wild birds. The reserve regulation prohibits any domestic animals inside the wildlife protected area. They must be captured and released outside the reserve. Easily said, but removing domestic cat which turned almost wild as any other small carnivore is not an easy task. Something interesting with domestic cats is their adaptability to the environment. They can easily be tamed by human, but they can also be easily become wild when given the right environment. They are highly agile and cautious so capturing them was almost impossible without a trap.

For this trip, I was planning on capturing the domestic cats and spaying/castrating them before releasing them outside the reserve. I came with a cat trap from KSPCA (Kenya Society of Protection and Care ｓof Animals) and Kichwa Tembo workshop made a temporally holding cage. If all goes well, tomorrow I will be doing operation on captured cat.

These cats roam freely in the reserve.

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