Wooing Dr. Diasti Dear Dr. Diasti, Thank you for coming to our rescue! At first this may all appear quite daunting, but we have some amazing systems in place to monitor our cats' health and our vet has access to all of this from her iPhone and from any computer. I have added you as one with Vet access, so please to not accidentally delete information. Changes you make on the charts appear for all of us on our versions. That is both the beauty of the site, and why we have to be very careful. This is where most of our cats' health records are kept and only 7 of our staff & volunteers and staff have access to this section: The Census is all of our cats, their ages and species. 74 of our 120 cats are over the age of 15 so we are dealing with lots of old age problems. These cats usually only live 10-12 years in zoos. Daily Med Charts are the dozen or so cats who are on meds daily. See the tabs at the bottom of the chart to click to different cats. Our Keepers log their initials to let the vet and our Operations Manager, Gale Ingham, know that the meds were taken. Documents has our USDA Program of Veterinary Care agreement that we have to keep on site for USDA inspections. How To Give Meds are training guides and a 25 minute video on how to use the sedation equipment and load the darts and jab stick. Med Inventory is the running inventory of our medications on site and is kept up to date by one of our Sr. Keepers. She also makes up the baggies for each cat's meds for each day. These are made up a week in advance and kept under lock and key. This is the anesthetic protocol and I think lions and tigers are somewhat different from each other in what works. The bold Record Archive is each of our cats and their medical history. The Record Archive 2 is for cats who have passed on, but kept as a reference. This link is our main Volunteer website where our 100+ volunteers make daily observations about the cats: These pages can only hold 500 entries each, so soon it will be a page ending in -2 Volunteers log the observations, the Operations Manager, Gale, checks them off after she checks on the cat and our vet checks them off after she looks at the cat on her weekly rounds. If this is too much bother for you, we can print the list on paper, and then after you have seen the cats, I will go in and check them off so that our volunteers know the cat has been seen by both the manager and the vet. In the left sidebar is a page called Food & Feces. Jamie Veronica and I do, because the first indication that a cat is sick is often when they leave food, or have some weird feces. The Food Chart link is for those cats who are always poor doers, so we know what goes in them and what comes out. The link at left called Med Charts takes you off this site and to the Secure Vet Log site at (mentioned above) The search feature on both sites is very good, so if you are looking for cats who had hypertension, you can type that key word and find the cat's charts. A lot of our files were handwritten and are on site, but they do not scan with OCR well enough to be included in our searchable charts. I am planning to scan and post them for reference individually though. I emailed Dr. Wynn and said I had found a vet who was willing to help out as a backup vet for when she is out of town, or unavailable, and asked if she would mind showing this person around and sharing her experiences. Since yesterday was her day here to do rounds, I don't think she will be available again before Sunday. We had another volunteer vet here, Dr. Kelly Rice, but she lives in Bradenton so she is having a hard time keeping up her hours as a volunteer. Dr. Wynn was always willing to let Dr. Rice help out on things, but Dr. Rice was only able to come once or twice a month and has said she is just too busy this time of year to come at all. Both women originally just came here to volunteer cleaning cages, but when I found out they were vets I asked them to help with veterinary stuff. Dr. Wynn apprenticed under Dr. Stacie Wadsworth for about 3 years, I think, before Dr. Stacie retired and moved out of state. Dr. Rice has only helped Dr. Wynn with a very few procedures and usually prefers to clean cages when here. (Dr. Wynn in green & Dr. Rice in yellow) The dark haired woman assisting in these, in the navy shirt, is my daughter and our President, Jamie Veronica. She trained with Dr. Stacie in her clinic so that she could assist here way back 15 years or so ago. Jamie is on site 5-6 days a week and assists in all of the vet care as someone who can lure the cats into lockout, net them if they won't and is the kind of person who will hold onto an angry cat well enough that you will never have to worry about being scratched or bitten. She also does all of our rehab work with bobcats. Naturally, I have been doing this for nearly 18 years as well and am almost always available to assist.

I've been writing my story since I was able to write, but when the media goes to share it, they only choose the parts that fit their idea of what will generate views. If I'm going to share my story, it should be the whole story. The titles are the dates things happened. If you have any interest in who I really am please start at the beginning of this playlist: http://savethecats.org/

I know there will be people who take things out of context and try to use them to validate their own misconception, but you have access to the whole story. My hope is that others will recognize themselves in my words and have the strength to do what is right for themselves and our shared planet.

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Music (if any) from Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com) This video is for entertainment purposes only and is my opinion.