My pal Lisa, whose blog is The Paper Tiger (where you can see another photo), helped care for this little fella named Zanuck — or maybe he’ll be named House, she says.
She writes, “This little guy is maybe 6 days old, rescued off one of the sound stages. Yesterday he was covered with fleas, weepy eyed and very cold.
“Today he’s a happy little kitten. He will still need to be bottle fed for a few weeks…”
I must scan an old photo I have of Samuel, a little fluffy cat I had about 19 years ago who loved garbanzo beans and humping my little girl’s harp seal puppet. (Yes, he was neutered, but some habits die hard, I guess.)
We spent almost all of today rescuing a feral mother and five kittens who were nesting in twisted prickly evergreen shrubbery beside an office building next door to Wal-Mart. The feral mom has resisted all previous attempts to trap her. And my daughter has socialized two batches of her kittens. We’ve wanted to trap her and spay her because it’s so hard to find homes for all those kittens.
My daughter and I first went to a pet food store and to another pet store to pick up baby bottles in case the mother couldn’t nurse the kittens. Then we met up with the man — I’ll call him T — who runs a software business in the building and who feeds the mom regularly.
The plan was to slip a collar, attached to a leash, around the feral mom’s neck. T crawled into the thick, low-growing evergreens, found the mom and nursing kittens deep under the shrubbery, and tried to slip on the collar. (This seemed like a good plan — the mom would be prone while the kittens were nursing, and more easily handled so that he could slip the collar over her head.)
T instead handed the kittens to us. That was the first big mistake (since the mom would no longer be prone). The mom got very stressed, and was running around in the shrubbery.
T then had an idea of getting a nylon cord and tying it with a slip knot around the mom’s neck. All five kittens were crying in the carrier, and the mom was running around near them. T finally slipped the nylon cord around her neck and she immediately went crazy, thrashing in mid-air, hanging and choking on the cord as it tightened around her neck. Her eyes bulged and T and my daughter were hysterical. The mom passed out. I remembered I had cuticle scissors in my purse, back in the car, so ran (a joke with my arthritis), got the scissors and handed them to T. By this time, the cat had been hanging, choked by the cord, for at least 3 minutes.
We rushed her into another carrier, hopped in my car, and drove to the only vet we know of that might be open. The mom was lying on her side, breathing, but not looking good. The vet’s office wasn’t open, but I spotted a vet tech leaving the building, called to her, and she — along with the primary veterinarian’s wife — got ahold of the new veterinarian who, after about a half hour, arrived to help us.
She put mom cat on oxygen and examined her carefully. Miraculously, the mom’s heart and lungs sounded good. The vet examined her neck which wasn’t cut.
Long story short, the mom and the kitten day-old kittens are in a large cage in my garage. My daughter set up the cage with soft cat blankets fresh from the dryer. The kittens are nursing. We gave the mom some high-fat, high-protein food. The vet suggested we leave them alone as much as possible, in a quiet dark place, for the first few days, which we will do.
It was a day of drama, fear, tears, anger, and great love and hope. I’m so tired, I can’t see straight, so am signing off.
But I’d love to see YOUR pet photos and hear YOUR pet stories! Have any of your pets had weird tastes in food like my Samuel with his “thing” for garbanzo beans?
Had a cat once with a fondness for my coffee… If i put a cup of coffee down on the desk and made the mistake of turning my back for two seconds, I had an empty mug and a thoroughly caffeinated cat. It’s not QUITE as insane as a catnip high, but she was already “rocket kitty” on her calm days…
And it was only MY coffee… if my ex-made it, she wouldn’t get NEAR the stuff. (Neither would I…)
… the kitten Gemini that was born with two faces?
that’s beyond freakish. Even worse than Ann Coulter and her dog:
We once had two pets — a goldfish named Goldie, and a hamster named Mr. Criskin. My wife, seeing Goldie looking a little peeked, decided to clean her fish bowl. In the process, she dropped and broke the bowl. Goldie at the time was in a kitchen glass. Since she wasn’t looking too good to begin with, my wife filled the large clear plastic terrarium where we kept Mr Criskin with water, and put Goldie in there; we put Mr. Criskin in a cardboard box.
Fearing that Mr. Criskin might gnaw his way out of the cardboard box, we put the box in the bathtub, figuring that if he got out of the box, he wouldn’t be able to get out of the bathtub. For some reason that is still unclear to me, we decided to put the terrarium with Goldie in the bathtub also.
When we awoke in the morning, we went to check on out pets. Mr. Criskin, as we had feared, had gnawed his way out of the box. Although Mr. Criskin was unale to climb the sides of the terrarium from the inside, somehow he was able to climb it from the outside. He fell in and drowned. Goldie also died during the night. So we woke up to both of our pets floating dead in the terrarium. Ah, the tragedy!
Oh my, this reminds me so much of my first and only kitty, Kittyroo. I came home from work one day and Mr. Bwren was standing on the porch. “I’ve done something rash”, sez he, opening his jacket in the manner of a dirty postcard vendor. There, in his jacket pocket, was the ugliest bit of fluff I’ve ever seen. Kind of greasy black with green crusty eyes and nose and a voice that would put Gypsy Rose Lee to shame.
Turns out our 90 year old neighbor, whose yard backed onto the local briar patch, had been feeding the feral kitties. That morning she went out and found this rag of kitten mewling in the food dish. Of course she called Mr Bwren, the man who takes care of everyone on the block. And Mr Bwren couldn’t resist. By the time I got home, the ~10 day old Kittyroo had taken up residence in Mr Bwren’s jacket pocket, where he stayed for a couple of weeks, fed on demand with a bottle and tidied regularly in a manner you don’t want to know about.
Kittyroo grew to 16 pounds of purring grace. He kept our urban estate rodent free, played tag with Jezzie, our 120 lb Great Pyrennes and was always there to join us when we retired in the evening.
He passed, way too soon, on New Years’ Day 2002. He’s buried under the planter box on the north side of the house. We haven’t found a kitty to replace him.
For 12 years we were blessed with a giant cairn terrier with a heart of gold and a mind like Red Skelton.
One thing that drove him absolutely looney was our metal Slinky. He loved to chase it down stairs, wrestle with it and try to kill it. We finally stopped him playing with it after a few years because we feared for his teeth.
You’d never believe from the photo that this was a loving, silly Toto dog:
He also loved to unwrap presents more than anything else he could do inside a house.
Sound .Wav file:
a-ROOO-ooooo!! play call .wav file.
Sorry the rescue was so traumatic, but I’m glad they’re safe in the garage.
I’m sure I have “sucker” written across my forehead in feline. One of my current cats actually moved herself into my house–along with her five kittens–by tearing a hole in a screen door. By the time that I noticed the hole, one self-satisfied mama cat and her very cute kittens were curled up snoozing in a chair.
But my favorite cat tale is the time that Kacey walked across the telephone and managed to speed-dial a friend of mine about 5 a.m. one morning. Clever kitty that he is, he also stepped on the speaker button. So I awoke to a sleepy, disembodied voice in my living room saying “Hello? Hello?”
At least he didn’t dial 911.
Those are hilarious ! Love them! Thanks :):)
I’m so wanting to check in on momma and babies but the vet was very firm about just giving them 2-3 days of quiet.
There was this nasty no good kid next door who killed a litter of kittens. So, what did his parents do? Why, of course they bought him another kitten. She was the cutest little calico, not even weened. They immediately left for the long memorial day weekend and left this little kitten on the second floor porch with no food or water. The roof was copper, so when she went out onto it, she slipped and fell off the second story. My roomate saw it happen and went and brought the kitten to me. She was so little, she tried to nurse off me. I stole her from the neighbors and kept her hidden until they moved. I would have gone to court to keep her. She is now 17 years old and had two litters of wonderful kittens. We kept two, but she has outlived even her own kittens. I wish I had a picture, but my Aggie Cat has been an amazing rescue kitty.
I am such a sucker. I was foster mom to the kitten pictured above for two days and I so miss the little mite! I don’t think I could foster kittens on a regular basis. I’d end up with 36 cats in my house. Right now I have four. Three are rather elderly, one is younger and a brat. I know that this is more than enough cats.
But I am already missing the tiny kitten that I held in my hands for two days. I’d take him home in a minute.
What a sweetie. He (or she) is going to be a very handsome cat!
Darcy was curious how he ended up alone.
I used to have a hyperactive American Eskimo dog, Sasha, who loved to race around and around the dining room table. Our cat, Andy, would get up onto the table, wait for the right moment and then jump down onto Sasha’s back. For a few hilarious moments he would ride her around the table.
This is the same cat who was diabetic and would wait by the refrigerator and meow if I was late in taking out his insulin and giving him his shot. (After several years, he “got over” the diabetes, btw, and was cured, though nobody knew why. The vet said they’d heard of such a thing but it was the first time they’d seen it in their practice.)
That is precious! And that sounds like one especially smart cat 🙂
I hope it goes well. My family has been wanting cats for a long time, but I’m pretty sure two or three of us are allergic. The last thing I need is human/animal incompatibility. I will not decide between keeping a pet or a child.
We have lots of animals around though. First are the greyhounds:
And some gerbils:
And many, many chickens. Probably about 45 right now. Most of which are chicks (about 6 weeks old). We’ll have lots organic eggs this fall!
There are always animal stories at our house, but today just pictures 😉
is a frigging genius. He now lives with my parents. Here he is this spring (he’s very fat):
When he lived with me in Ames, Iowa, I had a desk next to the door, a place to put keys and stuff as I walked in the door. I went away for a weekend, and the person I asked to look in on him while I was gone told me that when they’d come to my apartment, he’d been waiting for them in the entry way to the building. I noticed the same thing when I got home from work that week. The bugger was jumping on the desk and opening the deadbolt.
One day a few years later, I was sitting at my parents’ house, watching some television. The neighbor called, “Do you have a black cat?” I answered in the affirmative. “Well, I just thought you might want to know he’s wandering around outside.” He’d figured out how to open the sliding glass doors in the kitchen.
He’s an ornery old cuss. The only person he likes is my dad. Too damned smart, he is.