Doing our part for the kitty community

Lucky Mr. Simon has an appointment tomorrow afternoon to be screened as a potential blood donor kitty for sick and ailing kitties in need of transfusions at the teaching hospital! It would be awfully sweet if he could "give back" to the other kitties in the community --- and help build up some positive karma to counteract his garbage-eating karma so he doesn't end up reincarnated as a cockroach.

(Johnny might be off the list of potential candidates for now, due to his occasional gastrointestinal issues and his uncooperativeness [i.e. extreme squirminess] for blood draws.)

Just as an FYI, the feline blood donor program is pretty neat. The hospital used to have a colony of blood-donor cats that lived on site. Each cat donated every other month for a year or two then found a home. However, the cats eventually got too fat and it cost too much to feed and house them, so the hospital found homes for all but two cats - one cat of each major blood type - to have around in case of an emergency. The rest of the donated blood comes from cats in the community, almost all of which are owned by vet students. The cats have to be adults, at least 10 pounds, healthy, relatively cooperative, indoor-only with no contact with outdoor pets, and they go through some extensive blood screening for metabolic abnormalities as well as a bunch of yucky blood-borne diseases like feline leukemia, FIV, and blood parasites. They get dropped off for a day at the hospital once every 8 weeks, where they are sedated for their blood donation, then go home that afternoon. In return, the kitties get free physicals and all the bloodwork every year, and they get free food and heartworm/tick/parasite preventive medicine year-round. Pretty good deal for both the donor cats and the sick cats at the hospital that might die without a transfusion.