I’m sure I will jinx our good fortune as soon as I hit the publish button.
As you may know, we’ve been feeding a semi-feral female cat for a couple of years. She’s standoffish and is very fertile (12 offspring). We have plans to catch her and have her spayed through the local SPCA catch and release program, but for various reasons it hasn’t happened yet.
She and her latest brood of five went missing last week. One kitten showed back up the other day and has been pretty lonesome for her siblings. Fuzzy’s litter has taken to keeping her company, but they are seven months old and have things to do during long stretches of the day. I think things are getting better for the kitten as she gets used to not having all of her siblings around.
We have no idea what happened to the mama cat and the four other kittens. There’s been no carnage on the road. We walked around in the woods the other day to finally survey all the trees that went over in Hurricane Irene and saw nothing gruesome.
In some ways, we’re sad that something bad probably happened to them and we’re also relieved that we don’t have to deal with the extra mouths. Our backyard was seriously overrun with a gazillion cats. The kittens are on a waiting list for medical checkups and then “turn over” to the SPCA. We’ll see who actually ends up going for the first round of checkups. It may be the single kitten who survived whatever took away the rest of her sibling group.
Some of the cats in Fuzzy’s group are scheduled (fingers crossed) to be fixed and then adopted by some very special little girls–between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The others will be fixed as well and then released into the wild again. We’ll feed them as long as we can, but I’m hoping they’ll eventually grow tired of us. At least they won’t go out and make a dozen other cats.
Well over a week later, they are back and hungry. Tuesday is their first trip to the adoption haus. Let’s hope they are all healthy and can make the second trip and find their NOT HERE homes.
We are very excited about the newest arrivals to our family!
After AnnaMae gets fixed (the week after Thanksgiving), she’s going to have serious inside time. Fuzzy is totally ready but she needs some extra help so we’ll work on that. We figure a week inside should be good enough. We’re going to take the bed out of the guest room and let her hang out in there. We have one kitten left and she’ll probably go in there too.