Preparing the Cats for Immunization

With my upcoming move, I’m working on getting my cats ready for export.  It’s a long and annoying process that’s adding stress to an already stressful situation, but luckily things are working out fairly well for us so far on that front.

First off, some kind people were willing to donate funds towards helping my wife and I cover our expenses.  That’s really a great boon, given how much the whole process is going to cost.  We’ve pretty much got our plan down as to how to ship them over to the Philippines with minimal impact to our budget. I’m going to create a ‘How-To’ guide on moving cats from Singapore to the Philippines once we manage to get it done successfully ourselves, that way, hopefully, others who are in the same situation won’t have to stress out about visiting multiple sites to figure out what they need to do.

When I take them to a vet to get a health certificate I’ll be getting them their rabies shots, but first I’m going to get them current on their other shots and make sure that they have a shot record that also annotates their receiving dosages of heart worm and de-worming medication.  I don’t want any hang-ups when we arrive at NAIA in Manila.

I’m planning on doing that this week, but I ran into an issue.  I was short one cat carrier.  So, I messaged someone I know in a local cat advocate group called Mettacats, and they were kind enough to give me a loaner.  It’s a good thing I asked them about it too, because they let me know that the carriers required on planes are a bit different than the regular type and I would’ve wasted money buying another one.  I need to research that some more so I can make sure they’re ‘packaged’ appropriately for transport.

The Mettacats member has a clinic in Pasir Ris that’s close to where I live so I walked up there this afternoon to collect the carrier.  She was busy but had left instructions with her staff to get it out of the storeroom for me when I dropped by.

On the way back, I got a lot of interesting reactions.  The carrier was empty, but just the prospect of seeing a pet brought smiles to people’s faces.  It’s interesting, walking down the street and having kids and adults leaning close to peer into the carrier.  Too bad there was nothing interesting to show them, but maybe it’s lucky my cat Thumper wasn’t in there.  She looks sort of like a monkey-bat-cat.

Anyhow, I’m looking forward to getting this step in the process out of the way and I’ll update again, with pictures of them suffering at the vet, after the trip!