Heart-warming and heart-breaking work of cat rescue

If you’re active on social media, you can’t help but notice the amount of lost and found cat posts, and you may also notice the same names being tagged.

They are likely to be one of the ‘outreach team’ – a group of cat-loving volunteers working as a collaboration between Feline Network Cat Rescue and Hector’s House Cat Rescue.

We have volunteers with a huge amount of experience and expertise based throughout South Devon whose aim is to reunite lost cats and help those in need.

Our work is both heart-warming and heart-breaking.

We often get called out to scan a cat which has appeared in someone’s house or garden or is looking lost or injured, and if they have a chip and the details are up to date, we can reunite the cat.

Many cats have been reunited, some that have been missing for years, that is a wonderful phone call to make!

If the cat is not friendly, we can set a humane trap and take it into care to be assessed and checked by a vet.

If it does not have a chip then we will do everything we can to find the owner, including extensive social media publicity and the use of a paper collar but sadly there are so many abandoned and stray cats out there.

In those cases, we will give the cat any treatment they need - including neutering - provide warmth, shelter, food and a lot of love.

When rehabilitated, the cat will be found a loving new home.

Sadly, many cats are killed on the road and our volunteers will pick these cats up and check for a chip.

Hopefully, they can be reunited but if there is no chip, the cat will be taken to the nearest vet and the details published on social media to try and find the owner.

That, along with the poor condition that we find some of the cats in, is the truly heart-breaking side of cat rescue.

If you need our help in finding a lost cat or have concerns about a cat that looks lost, injured or stray, then contact Feline Network on 01803 392550 or Hector’s House on 07720 969525.