River, Simon, and Muffin
If you follow me on Twitter or in real life you might have heard about the newest additions to our clowder. This is part I of how our family came to have FIVE CATS:
One morning Chicken woke me up when Egg was still asleep. (I do not recommend this at all.) As I blearily looked around, I heard small cats mewling from what seemed to be the baby monitor. After taking out my ear plugs and putting on my glasses, I realized that my neighbor was standing next to me holding two adorable kittens. It is an odd thing to be woken by unexpected guests bearing kittens.
My neighbor dropped off her daughter at school early for a field trip, and found the kittens around the corner from our house on her way back home. One was in the street, the other under a car. She didn’t know what to do with them, so she brought them to me. They were friendly, purring, and mostly clean. I fed them, washed them, and trimmed their dagger-like nails. They were STARVING. They growled and made curious NOMing sounds while they ate. They didn’t hurt each other (or me) over food but it was apparent that they had not been well fed. I checked out their kitty bits and found that the big one was a girl and the runt was a boy. I called Adam and decided to hold onto them until we could figure out a better solution.
Now, I have my own set of rules about finding animals in the street. If they have an ID tag, I call the owner immediately. If there is a rabies tag but no owner tag I will call local vets in an attempt to find the owner. This saves the owner the cost and trouble of getting their pet out of the pound. If there is no tag and the animal is an adult I will call animal services to pick up the critter. I do this because it is the fastest way for a concerned owner to recover their pet.
However, this time I had two starving kittens. They were friendly, so I can assume that they were used to humans. They were not well-fed, so I can theorize that they were not treasured by their owners. For those of you thinking that kittens are always hungry, it took three days for these kittens to stop appearing as if they were starving. For three days they ate every meal like it was their first and possibly last. I decided to adopt a wait and see approach with the kittens. I assumed that I would find missing posters in my neighborhood within a few days.
Cannot be cuter. I love your pet philosophies. You’re doing good work here. Keep them. Five is a good number.
My recently retired coworker started adopting the stray cats in his neighborhood – actually, he adopted a mom and her kittens, got the mom fixed and released her. He also traps the other strays that come into his yard and takes them to the vet to be fixed or euthanized (if they’re ill/contagious) as needed. Why is this interesting? Because this is a guy who is known to be the opposite of a bleeding heart – we would assume he’d be more likely to take the cats out and shoot them rather than build them a lovely cat condo with a heating pad.
Good luck with your new kittens…
They’re so cute. I think now though they are yours. You feed them they stay and all. I would have done the same thing though.