#Another misconception is that they have a big row of circle teeth like a saw. No lol that's a lamprey

[bonefall]

How would a thunderclan cat go about caring for leeches? I imagine it would be harder for them than Shadowclan cats since I imagine things aren’t quite as like.. damp in thunderclan. I love leeches pls give me the husbandry lore 🥺

I'm taken aback at how many people want the leech lore, I did not expect this much love for Spotty's girls. But, ok!

For one, they are medicinal leeches. Hirudo medicinalis. This species is actually threatened in England, specifically because it's so rare for livestock to drink from lakes these days. So these wild leech specimens are actually found in ShadowClan territory, and they heavily rely on Clan cats!

They also do prey on the occasional boar, fox, or badger that wades through the mud. ShadowClan loves leeches, they think they are useful as medicine AND as snacks, leading to a symbiotic relationship.

(sadly this means that the expansion of the highway and the loss of the Clan cats massively disrupted the leech population. There are probably conservationists who discover too late that there were medical leeches surviving in this area and despair over how they could have saved the White Hart woods.)

Anyway, keeping leeches is easiest for ShadowClan of course, but ThunderClan can do it with some effort. Spotty has a two-part terracotta bowl (a dish and a lid) which helps keep them cool, even in summer, and she stores them in the darkest part of her den. At the bottom of this bowl is mud, wet leaves, swampy substrate.

It's not hard to feed them with worms or insects, but they have so many elders with joint pain that there's enough food to go around. Spotty also really doesn't mind just letting them nibble her arm; leech bites aren't painful or anything.

The hardest part is getting pond water when she needs to clean the bowl. You want water that's full of good bacteria that can support fish, not just any old ditchwater.

Before Yellowfang's exile, she would ask for ShadowClan pond water and usually be granted permission with an escort. Brokenstar didn't see a need to make a hard embargo with ThunderClan when he was so focused on eradicating WindClan first.

Yellowfang has a lot more knowledge about caring for leeches though. Because she can't access pondwater, she ran some experiments with the lesser-leeches (the ones that weren't Spotty's beloved 3), and found she can clean the bowl slowly using river water, but doing it all at once could shock the leeches.

But, it's not very hard. Harder than keeping mealworms, but leeches are an easy animal to keep. They're also really cute, like fat worms, with nice patterns.