More Kittens

Boy, it's been a long time since I posted to this!  I've been too busy to even mention that Ringtail surprised us in late August.  It turns out when she brought one set of kittens in from the storm, she was already working on another set.  She presented us with five new kittens, two ginger boys, a tabby/tortie boy, a tabby/tortie girl, and a black girl with white socks.

They are all adorable and are wandering about exploring their world.  The older kittens don't know what to do with them, but Wabble thinks they're wonderful.  We let them out for a couple hours at a time a few times a day so they can get socialized, but put them and their mother back in the nursery when the hissing starts.

A Whole Nuther Famiily

Yesterday, the remains of Tropical Storm Barry came through.  Ringtail, the female feral I've been taming gave us quite a surprise!  Diane called to me to come quickly, so I came running to see what she was on about.  I'd seen Ringtail up and about a little earlier and now she was up again, in the rain, with a kitten trailing along after her.  Diane and I went out to see, and Ringtail let us come right up to her, as she has been doing for some time.  The kitten, however, ducked beneath a car and climbed up into the wheel well.  Diane reached up into the wheel well and pulled the kitten out.  Meanwhile, Ringtail diappeared back down the storm drain.  Not knowing what else to do, we brought the poor bedraggled kitten inside.  About an hour later, Ringtail appeared again with another kitten.  This time we brought both her and the kitten inside.  Once she had settled the kittens in, eaten a couple of cans of food, nursed the kittens and got them to sleep, she jumped up on the window sill and called repeatedly out the window.   On the advice of a friend who does animal rescue, we took her back outside and she promptly went right back down the storm drain.  It was another couple of hours before she reappeared.  Diane said she had seen her running across the yard.  I went back out to see if I could find her.  Eventually, I went over to the storm drain to call her and saw her peering out, with another little nose peeking out beside her.  She came out and rubbed against my legs, calling to the kitten as if to tell her I could be trusted.  Eventually, the kitten came within reach, and I picked it up.  I heard a mewing, looked down, and saw another kitten coming out.  This kitten, however, was too scared to come out and kept ducking back down the drain.  About this time, Di came out to see what I was doing.  While she tried to persuade the kitten to come out, I brought the one I had caught inside and tucked it in with its siblings.  When I went back out, Diane handed me the fourth kitten, still struggling and spitting as if to convince either us or itself that it wasn't scared.  We brought the kitten and Ringtail back inside, and she settled in with the kittens.  She seemed quite content to stay in the middle room with her kittens until it started to get dark.  Then she went to the window and started calling again.  This time when I took her out, she only stuck her head into the storm drain and called, then repeated the process at the other storm drain.  Then she came back to the patio near the steps where I put the food for the ferals, calling all the while.  After a little while, the new tom, whom I call Young Tom, to distinguish him from Old Tom who passed away over the winter, came wandering up, and Ringtail went over to him.  I don't know what he said, but she whapped him on the nose, and they wandered off for a while together.  In the meantime, I brought out food for Tom and went back inside.  When I came back out, she was standing at the door crying to get in to her babies.  Tom, meanwhile, was eating; and when he finished he ran off into the night yelling loudly as if he couldn't believe what she had done.  She came back in with me, and now the whole family is safely ensconsed in our middle room with our resident cats safely shut out of it.

We are planning to foster her and the kittens until the kittens are old enough to be rehomed and then find homes for them.  In the meantime, I have the delicate balancing act of looking after and socializing Ringtail and her four kittens without our resident cats getting jealous.

Tags: cats, rescue, feral, kittens

Quality Control

I am very upset by the Menu Foods recall -- or rather, the reasons for it.  I hope they don't try to weasel out of compensating pet owners whose cats got sick and/or died as a result of their food.  I had a cat with chronic kidney failure, and that can get very expensive.

My point is, where was their quality control?  Why were they not testing their ingredients before to see if there was anything in there that shouldn't have been?  Also, why did they have so little idea of where the ingredients were coming from?  First they said the wheat gluten came from Canada, and now they are saying it came from China.

I do hope they find out how the poison got into the food in the first place and make sure it can't happen again -- at least without them finding out about it before they seal up the cans & pouches!  According to the news, no criminal charges have been filed.  In my view, somebody is guilty at least of criminal negligence.  If it turns out that someone put it in there on purpose, they deserve the death penalty (not to mention rotting in the special corner of Hell reserved for people who do that sort of thing).

My cats are my children, and it's only the pure luck that they don't like Iams or Eukanuba canned foods that has spared me from losing one or more of my cats.  My heart goes out to those who have lost pets to this poison.  I know what it is to lose a pet, and it is that much harder when you find out it could have been prevented if people you trusted to know what they were doing had been doing their jobs.

Tags: Menu foods recall, tainted cat food

A Lot of Catching Up

It's been longer since I wrote than I thought! In the time that has passed, the kittens have grown up a bit.  Two of them, GB and GG, have moved out to live with my friends in Manassas, Benjamin and Lisa, who have renamed them Jaime and Zoe.  They have grown quite a bit and are doing fine.  They've even won over Pearl, Lisa's 16-year-old moggy.

Of the remaining three, Star developed FIP in early September.  When Jazzle had it in 2005, she only lasted two weeks.  However, Star had a new vet who was willing to try new ideas and do some research.  She drained the fluid from his tummy twice a week and gave him a vitamin B shot each time.  We also had him on Predinsolone, Cytoxan, vitamin C, and pulsed dosing of antibiotics (one week on and one week off) to ward off secondary infections.  With this treatment, he was feisty and active for six weeks! When the crash came, it was overnight.  One night, he was fighting me over his evening meds, then overnight he kept shifting around as if he couldn't get comfortable.  The next morning, he was nearly comatose.  We took him to the vet, and I held him as he crossed the Rainbow Bridge.  His ashes now rest in a little box on our bookshelf with the notation:

Star
June 18, 2006 - October 12, 2006
One Feisty Little Bugger

Since the other two, Blaze and Wabble MacTabble, have been exposed and are susceptible until they are two years old, we decided it would be unfair to rehome them, so we are keeping them.  To date, they are very healthy and went in to be snipped and chipped a few weeks ago.  Blaze had her stitches out just before I left for the International Builders' Show in Orlando.  She is up to 6 pounds, and Wabble is a 10.2-pound boy -- as big as Freddie, and Freddie just turned 6 years old!  We recently had them all checked, and the biggest of them is 1-1/2-year-old Finn Mac Cool at 14.1 pounds.  Then come Freddie, Cocoa Puff, and Wabble, all tied at 10.2, then Romana at 8.9, then Mittens at 8.6, and Blaze at 6 pounds even.   All are currently healthy, and I hope they stay that way.

Now I'm in Orlando at IBS, running the exhibitor reg desk.  I've been down here a week, and I miss my kitties dreadfully.  I talked to Di the other day, and she said Finnie kept jumping up on the back of the green chair and whapping her in the head every time she sat in it.  She thinks he's decided she got rid of me so she could sit in my chair!  He jumped up on the arm of the chair, so she held the phone up so I could talk to him, and he purred at me.  He has a very soft mew for such a big boy, but he's got a purr-motor like a mack truck.  Every time Di tried to take the phone away so she could talk to me, he whapped her on the arm as if to say he wasn't finished.  She couldn't talk to me until he was good and ready to let her!

I also miss playing fetch with Blaze.  When we're in the bedroom and she wants to play, she will bring one of her tinsel buddies and drop it on the bed of whomever she wants to play with.  We throw it, she chases it around and brings it back until she gets bored with it and just wants petting and cuddles.  Oh, well.  I fly home in two days, and then I have a whole week off to play with my kitties and give them lots of cuddles.

On the subject of tinsel buddies, they are the worlds best cat toys.  They are actually tinsel pom poms that you buy at Wal-Mart or craft stores for about $2 for a bag of twenty, but every cat I've had has just gone nuts over them.

Tags: cats, siamese, meezers, cat toys

The Kittens Are Two Weeks Old

The kittens are two weeks old as of yesterday.  Their eyes are open, and they're starting to walk around in the queening box.  Mittens is spending more time outside the queening box checking out the rest of the house.  She's also making the kittens work a little more for their meals.  She's now lying at the opposite end of the box and making them come to her.  Last week, she got fed up with our "helping" the kittens find their way and started moving them out of the box and under the daybed.  Once we stopped picking the kittens up and let her mother them in her own way, she stopped moving them out of reach.  Now, we only pick them up if she's either lying on one of them or about to do so.

Mittens is putting more weight on recently.  You can almost not see her hip bones and shoulder blades.  She's also getting a little fiercer.  Last night, she met Romana in the hallway, and Romana was between her and the kitten room.  Romana hissed at Mittens, and Mittens chased her up onto the video cabinet, tail puffed out, and kept trying to jump up at her.  She couldn't figure out how to get up there by way of the climber, so she kept trotting back and forth in front of the cabinet, occasionally leaping up and putting her paws against the cabinet.  I'm not sure why Romana has suddenly taken to hissing at Mittens.  Perhaps it's because Romana had got used to being the "alpha female" and/or "Chief Fred Groupie", and she feels that Mittens has an advantage over her, being Siamese, intact, and having kittens.  Mittens also keeps trying to snuggle up with Fred, but Fred's not having any.  I'm not sure if it's because she ran off or because she has kittens that don't look at all Siamese, branding her a hussy, I suppose, in his book.

The kittens still have to be kept warm, so we have hardly turned the air conditioning on at all -- an unusual occurrence in July in Virginia!

The Prodigal Daughter

Doesn't it just figure?  Finally, something blog-worthy happens, and I've been too busy living it to write about it until now.  The miracle we hoped for has happened.  Mittens has come home!  We had been checking the PetHarbor.com found cat listings every day (a wonderful resource, by the way, whether you've lost a pet, found a pet, or want to adopt one, and severely underpublicized in my opinion), and in early June, we saw a picture of Mittens at the Prince Georges County Shelter.  PG County is in Maryland, on the other side of DC from us.  She was undernourished and pregnant, but when we went to look at her, everybody who saw her and the pictures we brought agreed it was the same cat.  As if that weren't proof enough, she came right to the door of the cage and started demanding to know where I'd been all this time in the creaky-door miaou that she uses when she's not happy.  When we opened the cage door, she came straight into my arms and settled in.  When I saw that her whiskers were ticked brown and white, I was absolutely certain.

We brought her home on Saturday and took her to the vet on Monday.  Other than being undernourished and pregnant, he gave her a clean bill of health, no FLV, no FIV, no parasites, nothing that we had feared might befall her on her own.

On Father's Day, June 18, she had her kittens.  There were six, but one of them died on the next day.  The other five are thriving, and their eyes are beginning to open.  There are two black kittens, two grey-and-white ones, and one dark grey tabby.  Mittens is a very good momcat  to them all.  She is starting to put on weight of her own now;  her ribs and spine don't stick out any more, and her shoulder blades and hip bones don't stick up as much as they did when we found her.

The other cats' reactions to the kittens are as varied as the cats themselves.  Freddie took a look at them, saw that none of them looked Siamese, and looked at me as if to say, "Someone gave her the wrong kittens!  They're not Siamese!"  He's such a snob.  He's starting to accept them, but he's still not quite sure what they're going to do.  Romana looked at them and seemed to accept them, but as she walked away, she gave a little hiss as if to say, "Mine were cuter!"  Romana had had a litter before we met her.  Finn keeps going up to the queening box and looking at them and then walking away with a slightly disappointed air as he realizes they're not big enough to play tag with yet.  Puff just keeps coming in and looking at them as if she's trying to figure out what they are.

We still don't know how she got to PG County.  Our best guess is that someone picked her up after she calmed down from her mad dash and took her home with them.  Then when she went into heat, either she slipped out to find someone who could do something about it and got lost again, or else whoever had her couldn't stand the noise of a Siamese in heat (anyone who has heard one will understand, those who haven't don't know how lucky they are) and turned her out.  Either way, we're glad she's home. 

The World's Worst Journal-Keeper

I think I must be the world's worst journal-keeper.  I write in this thing on average about once a month, even though things happen every day when you have cats.  The problem, of course, is that I'm too busy being in the moment to run off to the computer to write it down.  Recent developments include Finn getting the snip this week.  The vet said to keep him quiet the first night and that he would be normal by the next day.  In fact, he said that it was likely he'd still be woozy from the painkillers.  However, Finn woozy from anesthesia and painkillers doesn't seem that different from Finn wide awake.  Within a few minutes of getting him home, he had visited every food dish in the place and was playing Meezer Tag with Cocoa.

There's still no news of Mittens, although we are still putting food out for the strays and have seen a few of them in action.  However, we've also started getting raccoons at the feeding station.  We had an automatic feeder out there full of dry food, and they knocked the top half off and made off with the top half.  The next day, we put the remaining dry food out in a large plastic dish, and that night the raccoons made off with that!  We now have the dry food in a metal dish, and so far they have not been able to carry that one away.  If only we could be sure that Mittens is one of the strays we're feeding, though!

The cats are enjoying the Spring though.  We've started getting a wider variety of birds for them to watch.  The red-bellied woodpecker is back, and we've started seeing robins.  And today, I saw a tufted titmouse and a slate junco.  I haven't seen those two in over a year.

We've also started training Finn to leash and harness.  He still loves to run everywhere, which means I get plenty of exercise trying to keep up with him.  We tried putting a harness on Cocoa, but she went ballistic until we took it off her.  Romana takes well enough to the leash and harness, but she doesn't care much for being outside.  So for the moment, we are only taking the boys out.

However, as it's nearly feeding time, I suppose I should sign off for now.  Until next time (whenever that is)!