Wednesday, May 05, 2010

In Need Of A Large Trap Door

You know that phrase, 'morals of an alley cat?'
Or when Rhett Butler tells Scarlett that a cat would be a better mother than she is?
These are not random insults. Apparently cats kind of suck at mothering. They sleep with pretty much every tom in the neighborhood, don't care where or when they have the kittens and sometimes they up and walk away from the babies. No qualms at all.
Thankfully we have had all of our cats neutered or spade. But, as you may or may not know I am a sucker for a hungry face, so I feed a few other cats that are not mine. They aren't mine because they won't let me pet them and if I can't pet them than I don't claim them but still I feed them. Go figure. The short version of this randomness is, one of the stray cats that I feed was pregnant, she had at least three kittens and apparently isn't doing a good job being a mother because this is Spike:
And this is the one we don't have a name for yet:
We're open to suggestions.
But wait, I thought there were at least three, you ask? Yeah well, we can hear another one under the house - we have a small crawl space and a raised foundation - but we aren't sure exactly where and we can't reach it. (I really worry if we ever break a water pipe or something because I don't know how we'd get under the house to fix it.) And none of the critters are really ready to come when I call just yet.
Right before we went to bed last night I heard some mewing and figured the stray - we call her Drool - had had her kittens somewhere nearby. But the crying didn't stop and when I looked outside there was a kitten on the walkway rolling over and crying and crawling around.
I'm not sure if I am proud of myself or not for not going out right then and picking it up, but I didn't and left Drool to fetch her own offspring. This morning though, the poor thing was still there. We thought it might be dead but it wasn't. So I gave in, put it in a box and on my way to the car, to go to the pet store, found the second one behind the shed, laying in the dirt, crying and crawling around. I succumbed to that as well and so we have two. I only heard the third one right before dinner and am wondering what Drool has done, spreading them around the yard like Easter eggs.
We'll see if any of them make it through a second night.

This is me and I'm going to be busy for the next few weeks. Busy and/or sad.

4 comments:

RHM said...

Well, considering they're so little, I suggest names like "Sparta" and "Helga". tough names for these little balls of fluff.

Elizabeth said...

Well, she's doing what Momma cats are supposed to do, but not until they are old enough to handle it.

That's how we got one of our cats growing up, the Momma cat put Shadow in the alley next to our house...and MAN could he howl. But he was much bigger than those little babies...poor things...

Tarzan said...

Not to mention that Drool left the placenta on our front mat before running off. Gross!

Rocketgirl said...

Oh my heck, I was going to say how sweet this is and what a good person you are, and then I saw Tarzan's comment. Now I'm laughing hysterically. Basically, now I think you're a good person for not mentioning that in your original post.

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