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Jill's Life Indoors

Momma cats

This is my second time fostering a momma cat with kittens. The first time, it was Alice. She was a stray who was about 5 weeks pregnant when I took her in. It was hard to see poor Alice, this beautiful cat, going through so much for these babies and then being repeatedly passed over for adoption in favor of smaller, cuter, younger cats. First she was abandoned when pregnant in the frigid Baltimore winter (it was 16 degrees on the day she gave birth, February 5, 2007). Then she gave all of her strength to nourish the 7 lives growing inside her. She labored hard for several hours before the C-section was performed. She came out of surgery shaven, spayed, and sedated. Her bare belly dragged on the ground; the skin was so stretched from carrying 7 kittens. Her face was drawn and pathetically skinny. Her ribs and spine showed through her fur. Her belly felt like lots of warm golf balls as she developed mastitis. She was a shell of her former (and fortunately future) self. In four months we had not one application on her. I felt so sad for her. When it was time to move across the country, I had to decide if I’d find another foster for her or just adopt her myself. It was a tough decision, because 3 cats is a lot (we already had 2), but she had already settled into our family such that I decided to keep her forever. I don’t regret it a bit.

Now I have another momma cat. Jill. She’s unremarkable to look at. In person, she is affectionate; she climbs into my lap, head butts my hands for attention, purrs SO loud, rolls around, and is generally a love (I secretly want to keep her). She’s the kind who will do a “headstand” for attention: she pushes her head into your hand so hard that she ends up with her head on the floor and her butt in the air. I think she’s beautiful and unique; she has white legs but one black “thumb,” she has unusually large eyes, and her black parts have a brown tinge to them. She has perfect teeth which tells me that she’s probably a youngin’; maybe two years old. Of course, she has a rash on her chin and her back half that has caused hair loss and scabbing, and her belly is fat and saggy. She’s also an adult, which is yet another strike against her. But I would fill myself with mom cats if I could. Too often, they get pregnant when they never should have been, and their babies are adopted while they themselves are euthanized in shelters. No one wants adult cats. These mom cats go through so much and instead of being cared for and loved for it, they are instead abandoned by their “owners.”

The moral of the story, I suppose, is that all cats have love to give. The ugliest ones might just be the most loving. It’s not Alice’s fault that she’s kind of ugly and generally unremarkable. It’s not Jill’s fault that she grew up and got pregnant. But because of the faults of their “owners,” Alice was left outside and would have died in childbirth, and Jill was left to become a kitten factory with a painful rash all over her body. There are beautiful cats out there in unfortunate circumstances, and in choosing a cat to adopt, I think it helps to be compassionate and to understand that the cute kittens will get adopted…the other ones may not be so lucky.

They're growing up

Yesterday evening I spent lots of time with the kittens and Jill. We have determined that there is indeed a runt and a giant in the litter. The runt is the little guy with the black head and the symmetrical white markings on his face; he has been nicknamed Skunk. He just finished opening his eyes yesterday, when he was 11 days old (the first of the group, Lily, started opening her eyes at 4 days old; the rest of the kittens had their eyes fully open by 9 days). The Goliath of the bunch is the white boy with the black tail, nicknamed Spot. He is just gigantic! His all-white body really stands out when he’s in the pile with the rest of his littermates.

Jill is still doing well. She has white feet and lots of white on her, and she looked pretty dirty when she first moved in. But a week of being indoors has done her well, as her fur has turned white again from yellow, and she’s slowly getting shinier. I noticed that she sheds a lot, and I don’t know if that’s a Jill thing, or if it’s just a function of her not having been brushed or petted in quite a while. She continues to hiss at startling sounds, but she doesn’t seem to mean it, it’s just a reflex. I’ll be petting her and she’ll be purring LOUD, and then a kid outside will yell and she’ll hiss and then continue purring. I’m hoping this behavior settles down soon, because I’d hate for the babies to pick up on it.

We will be doing a big cleaning of her area this evening and will take some new pictures of the little ones. They’re getting big for sure!

Three boys and two girls

So I've finally determined the genders of all of Jill's babies. That's not always easy on teeny kittens, so it took a week for me to decide. Here they are (with their names, based on their appearances):

Lily (for lily-white): female, all white. It appears she has a little bit of black coloring on her ears, but they are so little and it is so faint that I can't really tell yet.

Blaze (for the blaze of white on her face): female, black and white.

Skunk boy (for the symmetrical white markings on his black face): male, black and white.

Spot: male, all white with black tail and two black spots on his head (as well as some weird black spots on his back legs)

Smudge: male, crazy mixture of black and white, with a black "smudge" across his nose. This guy totally looks like a cow with his unusual spotted markings.