Friday, September 24, 2004

Cat virus hits SPCA
by MARK NIELSEN Citizen staff

Prince George SPCA staff were forced to put down nearly two dozen cats Wednesday after a virus swept through the communal room at the shelter -- just 10 days before an isolation room meant to prevent such outbreaks is scheduled to be opened.
Staff arrived at work in the morning to find one cat had already died and another six were vomiting. Shelter manager Jeannine Woodhouse and another staff member spent the rest of the day putting down the 22 remaining cats that were in the room.

"It wasn't a pleasant thing to come to work to and we just didn't want to risk it being spread to any other cats," Woodhouse said.

As well, the communal room, where the cats are put out to be showcased for adoption, was disinfected. Quarantining was out of the question, Woodhouse said, because another 85 cats were still sitting in the shelter's back room.

"I had no room for them and we didn't know how sick they were," she said.

Ironically, after several weeks of effort by two volunteers, the transformation of the old locker room into a new isolation room was expected to be ready next Friday.

"With it we won't have this problem," Woodhouse said. "We'll be able to quarantine our sick ones in the isolation room and not have what they have transmitted to our upper kennels."

Precisely what virus the cats were exposed to is not known, but Woodhouse suspects it's one that commonly brings down cats that have not been vaccinated. Where it came from is also a mystery.

"We don't know where it came from, we don't know who the carrier was," she said. "We don't know how it was transmitted, if it was human transmission or if it was animal transmission. We just know that they were sick."

The shelter has been receiving hundreds of cats each month, Woodhouse said, ever since the shelter was no longer able to fund a program to help low-income people spay and neuter their pets due to the loss of $50,000 in lottery money.

"The program was highly utilized and it seemed to be making a difference because our numbers were going down," she said.

Woodhouse blames the influx for the drastic action on Wednesday.

"Usually, if we see a sick cat we can catch it and we can quarantine it," she said. "This was sort of because it was so crowded we just didn't have anywhere to put all these cats and a decision had to be made."

Another dozen feral cats held in the outdoor kennels and not affected by the virus were also put down.

I have many questions regarding the SPCA's management of this. One of the biggest being - why did they kill 12 feral cats who were not affected by the virus when there are feral cat rescue groups in town who could have been called to help?