IN the middle of Orange, Laura Ferguson and her mum Rebecca live with up to 28 cats at a time, but they are on a mission to stop the animals breeding.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The pair run a small rescue home called Blossoms Rescue from their house in March Street where they scour buy, swap and sell sites looking for people advertising “free to good home” kittens and cats.
“People give us strays as well, or cats who they know have been victims of cruelty and stuff,” Laura said.
The Fergusons then take the pets to the vet where they are vaccinated, desexed, wormed and microchipped, all at their own cost.
Laura said the cats she found through advertisements were rarely desexed, some had been abused and most were unwanted kitten litters.
She wants to stop the cycle.
“My mum and I, we just want to help animals ... we couldn’t do the same thing with dogs because we don’t have the room,” she said.
“I just love seeing the looks on people’s faces when they come to adopt a cat, they just look so happy.”
The pair then advertise the wormed, desexed and microchipped cats for adoption where they usually charge about $150 per cat, which means for vet bills alone they run at about a $70 loss per cat.
That does not include the daily costs of cat litter, food and the occasional emergency cal-outs from the vets.
“Since April we’ve been able to re-home 42 cats,” Laura said.
“We just want to make sure that people are getting desexed cats rather than buying them from shops or off the internet and then not bothering to get them done.
“We want to stop unwanted kittens from happening.”
The cats live inside and outside the home but they are always fully enclosed. The largest number of cats the Fergusons have had at any one time is 28.
The Fergusons recently adopted two litters of abandoned kittens on a farm and Laura has been up every four hours handfeeding the days-old felines.
“All the vets comment how friendly and socialised they are,” she said.
The pair have started to struggle recently with finances because they have had a few emergencies with the fragile orphans, but Laura said no matter how financially draining the project was she would always find a way to continue re-homing healthy pets.