We took her to the vet’s early the next day to have her checked over and so that she could have her vaccinations. The vet ran some routine blood tests for common local diseases and thankfully she tested negative for all of them. The vet also established she had already been neutered and she had a very faint number tattooed inside her ear, which would have been done by one of the local councils. So it looked like she had been in the care of a local council at some stage and had then been let loosed once she had been neutered.
Before visiting the vet I had stopped off and bought her a pretty pale pink collar and lead, but Emma didn’t know how to walk on a lead and she objected to it and tried to slip her collar, so while I was at the vet I purchased a pink harness for her as well, which was harder for her to get out of. It took some time for her to learn how to walk on a lead without objecting, but we got there in the end and after only a couple of days she was enjoying trotting out for walks along the local coastal road.
We were lucky that our garden had high walls around it so the only place I thought she might get out was by squeezing through the pedestrian gate or driveway gate. These had vertical metal railings and she could have squeezed through but she actually didn’t try to do this. Perhaps it just didn’t occur to her. She really enjoyed running around the garden, which was quite a large space and she loved stealing the cat food that I left out for the feral cats and trying to chase them away as well. She also loved to fish the pool thermometer out and dump it somewhere around the garden. The thermometer is shaped like a turtle so she likely thought it was a toy, but she never chewed or damaged it in any way.
On one occasion I had to pop out and I left her in my husband’s care sitting by the pool. I decided to tie her up by her lead to the leg of the sun lounger my husband was sitting on to make sure she didn’t decide to come looking for me and end up squeezing through the garden gate, running away and getting lost or run over by a car. She was sitting in the shade under the sun lounger and had plenty of water nearby. However, when I returned I was surprised to find she was soaking wet. It turned out that after I had left she had become agitated and had slipped her collar and ended up falling in the swimming pool in the process. Thankfully my husband had fished her straight out, but I think the whole episode had frightened her and it meant she had more respect for the pool after that, which was probably a good thing.