Shelter me!

Medford, MA, May 8, 2009

If you read this story by Rob Barry (Wed., May 6, 2009), you may be interested in the latest installment in this miniature saga. Cindy Dever from Charles River Alley Cats shared some tidbits with me yesterday.  Perhaps the least surprising aspect is that the feral mother cat has been hiding inside a box in her cage from the moment she was reunited with her kittens six days ago. The mom cat appears to be doing her best to nurse six of the seven kittens.  That is a large number of offspring for a cat. The runt of the litter (who weighs five ounces vs her three largest siblings who weigh about 11 ounces) doesn’t get much chance to feed.

The foster (human) Mom from Charles River Alley Cats has been making a special effort to bottle feed the runty one; she even brings her to work, which may sound outlandish but there are not many other options. Three week old kittens need to feed every hour and a half. A human taking on their care is adopting a very, very small truly constant companion.

We hear the healthier six are doing well but their human foster mother, just to be safe, has been bottle feeding them also.  Cindy explained that all six kittens leave the box where their feline mom is hiding whenever their foster mom appears with a bottle. Amazing that three week old kittens can shed their fear of humans so quickly. But if they meet humans when they are young enough — less than eight weeks old — they can adjust to people very quickly.

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Cindy and I had a far less charming reminder of Kitten Season last evening when we went over to the Animal Rescue League for a brief visit. We went to see several cats that we heard might be appropriate for barn placement.  Potential barn cats have less than open, friendly personalities. Sometimes they are just plain sick of being in a cage and they snarl at the people who come to see them. Or they are unpredictable; one moment you can pet them and the next moment, they swat you. My impression is that a lot of cats behave this way; my mother had a cat for 15 years like that. 

But when the shelters are bursting at the seams with stray cats and abandoned cats and dozens and dozens of kittens, a cat with an uneven temperament can outlive its welcome in an open admission shelter pretty quickly. The good news is that these ‘hard-to-adopt’ cats frequently have an ideal temperament for the barn environment, which rewards scrappy “mousers” with free room & board and lifetime employment.  

We found eight hard-to-adopt cats that we thought would be ideal for barn placement.  At this moment, we don’t have quite enough barns to take that many cats.  But once we see them and they strike us as lovely animals despite their flaws, it is hard to let them go. We both think that if we push the right buttons, we can find positive alternatives for these cats.  ARL wants to save them as much or more than we do. Nobody who works with animals wants to euthanize healthy, homeless cats that have (often inadvertently) gotten on the wrong side of a human or two.