The Blog Pound

Friday, May 12, 2006 , early evening

If you feed them, they will come

Last November I wrote about buying a discounted Rubbermaid doghouse, which I keep on our front porch as a haven for stray cats. I put a blanket inside, and on the “doorstep” of the house I keep a bowl of kibble and water. I’ve had many cats wander through to eat the kibble, although none seem to hang around for very long, and lately I’ve been sure that most of the kibble is being eaten by birds. I don’t begrudge the birds a snack (there are so many birds nesting in our roof tiles that I’m sure they love the convenience of take-out), but they do tend to make a mess. Every morning I have to go out on the porch to sweep up the stray kibble so I don’t attract ants or my despised cockroaches.

This morning I was casually just shifting the kibble dish and sweeping up under it when I glanced into the doghouse and something looked back at me Kitten! Cowering in the very back, partially hidden by the blanket, was a tiny grey kitten. I reached it to pick it up and it hissed at me but didn’t lash out, so I was able to scruff it and brought it inside. Flippy brought a crate down from upstairs, and I popped the kitten inside for a better look. It was fairly long-haired grey kitten with white feet and a white tail tip, and it was very dirty and full of dried bits of leaves. It was scared, but would allow me to pick it up, and eventually it started purring. I couldn’t decide if it was feral or not, because it obviously wasn’t drawn to people, yet it was fairly complacent. I figure it’s about six weeks old.

Not knowing what else to do, we quarantined it in our downstairs bathroom for a few hours, then took it to the vet for the FIV/FeLV test, a fecal test, and a general checkup. It turns out that it’s in good health but with a mild upper-respiratory infection, so it’s still in our downstairs bathroom and is taking amoxicillin. Our money is really, really tight since Flippy’s surgery (we got some of those bills yesterday, and she’s had $40000 in surgical procedures since January), but I wanted to make sure the kitten had the minimum amount of care necessary to allow it to integrate into our household while we try to find it a home. It obviously needs some more handling to get it used to being touched, and I think it would do it good to be around some other cats as soon as the URI clears up. I absolutely don’t want to keep it at all—I feel close to overwhelmed as it is, and if I can’t find a home for it quickly I’ll contact a local rescue group to see if they can find a home for the cat while we foster it. Having had our “kitten experience” this year, I really see how much it benefits kittens to be adopted in pairs, so it would be great if I could find a companion for our little stray. We’ve temporarily named her “Rory”, after “Rory Gilmore”. She almost ended up being “Veronica” after “Veronica Mars”, but it was such a big name that it didn’t feel right.

Anyway, here’s what you want—a photo:

I have a question about feral kittens—if the kitten I found today was truly feral, would she be more aggressive to me than she is? She doesn’t mind being picked up and held (she purred so loudly for the vet that he had to turn on water to startle her so he could listen to her heartbeat), but she doesn’t actively seek out human attention. I’ll sit downstairs with her and she’ll play with some toys near me, but doesn’t really acknowledge me unless I make the first move. When I first enter the room, she always runs and hides. This is very unlike the kittens we bottle-raised, who weren’t happy unless they were climbing all over us, constantly. I’m trying to gauge her background a bit, and to figure out if she’s possibly a runaway or if she was perhaps born in our neighbour’s backyard in one of his abandoned cars.

In a fascinating twist of irony, while writing this blog entry I went to look for the old entry where I wrote about the Rubbermaid doghouse to see if I should link to it. I found it was just a few lines embedded in another entry about my friend Celine in the Philippines, whose cat had passed away that same morning. Today, while I was finding a kitten in my doghouse, Celine in the Philippines was finding a stray cat at her house as well, and she’s adopted it. It’s such an odd coincidence, because my doghouse was put into use the day her original kitten died, and today was the first day my doghouse was really used, and she found another kitten to adopt. Freaky, man.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/12 at 07:55 PM
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