William Shakes-purr Needs Your Help!
Cat Sanctuary resident severely broke his leg – no one is quite sure how! – but we are going to make sure this young guy is back on all-fours soon! Can you help?
Accidents happen. In this case … we don’t know how.
William Shakes-purr broke his leg. No one saw it happen and we can’t figure it out. He may have simply jumped from a high place and landed wrong. But this is not Much Ado About Nothing! It resulted in a very serious, horrible break.
This RAPS Cat Sanctuary resident is no stranger to challenges in life. He was part of a massive rescue operation in which a large colony of approximately 300 cats in Alberta were trapped. RAPS took in 44 cat from this colony in June of 2021. Of these, 18 were semi-feral and seemed unlikely to find a forever family. They have settled in to the Sanctuary, while the rest were social enough to be adopted out. William is one of these.
William lives a highly social life with a clowder of friends in Pen 3 in the Sanctuary’s idyllic back courtyard. Most of these cats are small, with short legs, and look like older kittens, rather than the fully grown cats that they are. This could be due to inbreeding or lack of adequate food for their mothers when pregnant.
All of the staff and volunteers have worked hard on socializing these cats, but some cats are more amenable to human contact than others.
Lisa, one of our humans who has a special talent for coaxing ferals out of their shells, has created a bond with many of these little beasts. (Her steady supply of yummy snacks doesn’t hurt her cause, but we prefer to think she has a special spirit that attracts human-wary kitties!) Either way, these special felines tend to come out of nowhere when Lisa is in the back courtyard.
One day recently, Lisa noticed that William hadn’t come out to see her, which was weird. But she didn’t think too much of it. But when she returned to the back courtyard an hour later, she saw him walking on three legs.
She notified management and med staff who rushed him to the vet for pain control and X-rays. This was very clearly something more serious than a minor paw injury.
The X-ray showed that he had broken the radius and ulna in his left front leg – a serious situation requiring surgery. How it happened remains a mystery – although many of these cats are pretty fearless when it comes to climbing, so we have to assume that he simply fell wrong and, in a freak accident, suffered a dramatic break.
This guy is about 3-and-a-half years old, so he has a long life ahead of him. The key is to get him back on all-fours!
William Shakes-purr needs your help!
The RAPS Cat Sanctuary is an all-inclusive Kitty Club Med … that means that every need is met – including medical care. But it’s a costly undertaking for a complex orthopedic surgery and we count on loving animal allies in the community to help us meet urgent cases like William’s.
Can you help?
This surgery is going to cost thousands of dollars. We are confident, though, that it will make William the happy, curious and contented guy he was before.
Please give to RAPS Emergency Cases Fund to help cover William’s medical care.
Thank you!
