The Way of Cats

Cat Emergency Planning

by WereBear on Sep.09, 2008, under Care

If we love our cat, we worry about the time they might leave us. If we love our cat, we should also worry about us leaving them.

cat
more cat pictures

No one likes to address such an unattractive prospect, in either case. Yet it’s worth considering alternative arrangements for our pets in case of emergencies. We might need some help if we get sick or injured, and just aren’t up to taking care of them. It’s bad enough to be dealing with a health problem. At such a time, we will want and need the prospect of picking up our life where we left off. We can put the couch in storage. We can’t do that with cats.

If we get stuck in an airport or delayed with a car breakdown, it’s comforting to know we have someone who can make sure the cats have what they need. This can develop into other contingency plans for our pets.

Fellow cat lovers are good choices for a mutual cat care agreement of some kind. This can develop into further plans; what if we have to move suddenly, and can’t take the cats for a period of time? It’s good to know we can “park” them with caring people until we have a good situation for them to come back to.

Do we have the resources to take the cats with us if we are threatened with extreme weather, a local emergency, or some other extraordinary event. Don’t get caught with one carrier and more than one cat. Have a plan, even if it’s keeping a duffel bag at the back of the closet. The point of emergencies is that we don’t have much time to think, so we need to have plans ready.

Consult this PDF document for more disaster preparedness tips.

The computer age has impressed on all of us one important principle: Always have a backup. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. I have found the hard drives that aren’t backed up are more likely to fail, that a document we don’t make a copy of before editing will become a hopeless mess, and having food in the pantry makes it less probable we will get snowed in this winter.

Even if it doesn’t work that way, it sure seems to work that way. So invest in some peace of mind by exploring the options we have for helping others take care of the cats, no matter what happens.

    Got here from a Link or Search?
    There’s more ways to care for our cat with The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See all of my posts on CAT CARE.

:,
3 comments for this entry:
  1. Katherine
    September 9th, 2008 on 12:27 pm

    PDF file appears to be blank. :-(

  2. WereBear
    September 9th, 2008 on 1:09 pm

    Dang!

    That was weird, but now fixed.

    Thanks for letting me know.

  3. Helena Handbag
    September 11th, 2008 on 5:49 pm

    I’m adding your disaster preparedness info into the organizational notebook I keep at my kitchen desk. It’s a nice detailed addendum to this list that I already have in there, the Eleven Points of Preparedness for Evacuation. The web site I got the list from has the world’s dopiest graphics, but it has helped me organize and de-stress my life a lot!

    http://www.flylady.net/pages/FLYingLessons_Prepared.asp

Leave a Reply

Looking for something?

Use the form below to search the site:

Still not finding what you're looking for? Drop a comment on a post or contact us so we can take care of it!

Visit our friends!

A few highly recommended friends...

Archives

All entries, chronologically...