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?
