April 22, 2010

  • Several days ago (afternoon of April 18 to be exact), my wife noticed a cat running away from our front yard. Turns out she left six baby kittens on our yard when she took off. We actually had to even shoo a raven away, who was making an attempt to get one of the kitties. Well the first thing we thought about this baby kittens was that they were abandoned. So what were we going to do about them? We thought of going to the pet rescue people that we usually find at PetSmart, but they weren't accepting abandoned baby cats at the moment. We weren't going to call the pet shelter or the ASPCA either, because that's guaranteed death to the baby cats.

    I consulted the local vet, and they told me that those kittens were probably in the middle of being moved by her mom. The general advice was that we should leave them alone for the time being, until we are sure that the mommy cat really did abandon her kids. I wasn't sure how we could tell and were concerned as to whether the kittens were being fed at all by their mommy. The vet told us that if the kittens are not crying the whole time, then that means that they are getting fed by the mommy cat. Well, they definitely were not crying at that time, and were simply just asleep. Let nature take it's course I guess.

    Using gloves to avoid putting too much human scent on the kittens, we put them on a towel and in a carrying crate, so that they are a little bit out of the elements. The crate's door was left open, so that the mommy cat can still get to her kids. We then moved the crate to our front porch, so that they don't attract other animals too much (although we question how protected they really were). Several hours later, we find a seventh kitten that was added to the mix. I guess the mommy cat came back with another. The final total for that day ended up being five black and two orange kittens. One of them I dubbed being "punk" because it's a black cat with an orange streak of fur on it's head.

    A day passes by and there's no change to their status. Baby kittens were still at our front porch, but they were at least still alive and were not crying. Mommy cat must just come by sporadically then, but I still never saw her. At one point there was evidence that she did come by, based on how the towel was indented on one side, while the other side had the litter of kittens bundled up. It looked as if the mommy cat must have been lying next to them at some point of the day.

    Another day passes and things started to look grim. The kittens looked noticeably affected by the colder weather, and I did hear them cry a bit more than before. The kittens were starting to crawl out of the crate by themselves as well, but I didn't know what that signified. I wasn't around the whole time to watch them, but when I would return to check on them, they weren't crying anymore. Was the mommy cat really still feeding them? I got the impression that this was some domesticated house cat that only came back when she felt like it, and didn't visit her kids as often as she probably should have. We decided to give it one more day, and if things don't improve, we were going to take immediate action.

    The next day, we sadly find out that four of the seven kittens died (two blacks and the two orange ones). We figured that it was because of the cold. We decided there and then that we had to decide for the welfare of the remaining three kittens. My wife's friend's sister was studying to be a vet, so she took the last baby cats for the rest of the day. They took the cats to get checked up on by the vet, and of course fed them.

    As of this blog post, the three kittens are still alive. They are currently with another party who was interested in having cats, so the surviving kittens went to that person. I can only hope that they grow up healthy from then on.

    My wife said while I was at work at night, our dogs were barking at something outside at the front porch. Supposedly there was a cat outside, which we can only assume was the mommy cat looking for her kids. If that's the case, sorry about taking the cat's kids, but we were afraid that the whole litter would have died if we didn't intervene.

    I'm actually quite a bit saddened by this whole experience. I wish that we could have been able to get a happy ending with all the kittens surviving. At least the next time this happens to us again, we'll know better as to what we have to do.