(Continued from earlier posts: Part 1 and Part 2)

The ride to the PACCA was traumatic: I noticed the mother shaking and panting heavily in her cage; her tongue lolled out of her mouth. I kept telling her that I was sorry. The kittens were trying to climb out of their box, and I had to reach back several times to push them gently back inside.

When I arrived at the shelter, I asked everyone I could whether or not they thought that the kittens would be put down. One attendant looked at me, pointed to a sign on the wall, and read it out to me. The sign went something like this:

Due to overcrowding, we cannot accept any kittens under two pounds. Kittens weighing less than two pounds are likely to be euthanized.

Please consider providing foster care for your kittens until they reach two pounds.

I kept looking down at those cute kittens in the box. I had come in worried about the mother’s welfare, but now it looked like the entire group of cats might be endangered. A woman emerged from the back room and demanded to know who had brought these kittens in to the shelter. She told me that they were likely to be put down unless I could provide foster care for them, and she pleaded with me to take them in. I asked whether or not I could take only one or two, but she said that I shouldn’t separate the litter.

I couldn’t leave them to an uncertain fate. There wasn’t much I could do for the mother at this point, but it was within my power to save the kittens.

So I agreed to join PACCA’s foster parent program, and to provide foster care for these kittens. I didn’t even have time to clear this with my wife — I just made the decision to take them in.

We’ve now had the kittens in our downstairs bathroom for four and a half days. It has been an immensely rewarding experience so far. The kittens are all cute, friendly, and affectionate.

(click on pictures to enlarge)

When we brought the kittens into our home, they had never tasted food — having only had their mother’s milk, they didn’t even know what food was. They were hungry, but they’d walk up to the food, sniff it, and walk away. We eventually got them to eat wet food by getting them to lick little bits of it off of our fingers. They are now feeding regularly on both wet and dry food, and they all use the litter box.

Unfortunately, they also tend to frolic in the litter box, quite often after using it for other purposes. We’ve done more loads of laundry than I can count in recent days, and I’m constantly cleaning the floor of the room in which they’re living.

But I can’t tell you how happy it makes me when I see all four of these kittens going at their little plates of food! And how amazing it is when they meow at the sight of me, when they close their eyes and purr as I stroke their chins and bellies.

All four of the kittens are absolutely beautiful, and remarkably healthy for having lived outside for so long. We’ve named the two above Nigel (gray and white) and Celene (orange and white).

Nigel has a very special place in my heart, as he is the runt of the litter. He was the last one to eat, and he most needs affection. For a long time, he kept trying to suckle our fingers in search of food. Celene, who has a girl’s name but is actually a boy, is the strongest of the bunch and is amazingly sweet.

We refer to the other two kittens as “the twins.” They both have tiger-like black and yellow-gray stripes. One of them is a little smaller than the other, and a little more shy.

Part of what we’re doing is socializing the cats — getting them used to human contact. This process has made me wonder whether my own cat, Luna, had such a socialization process, because she can be a little resistant to contact. Judging by what I’ve seen so far, I think that all four of these kittens are going to grow up into kittens who love to be held.

We ran into a big issue two nights ago, when we discovered a flea on Nigel. Knowing the problem could spread if we didn’t act quickly, we flea-combed all of them (finding a total of three fleas), and then removed the kittens from the room, which we doused in a diluted bleach solution.

The next day, my wife and I spent a long time flea-combing and shampooing the kittens, and using flea spray and carpet powder on their entire living quarters. We did our last clean-up of the area last night. As of today, none of the kittens have flea dirt on them, so I hope I’ve tackled the problem by going ballistic on it.

Besides that issue, which I hope has been resolved, all of the cats appear to be in perfect health.

We can’t keep the kittens too much longer, so we’re going to give them to another foster family soon (perhaps tomorrow). The work we’re doing for them is amazingly rewarding, and indeed life-saving, but it is also time-consuming.

If you are interested in adopting (or fostering) one of more of the kittens, please get in touch. Before you adopt (and once the kittens have reached two pounds), the PACCA will spay the kittens and give them shots, etc., for the adoption fee of $25. And it’s “buy one get one free” season at the PACCA.

I have to say that these kittens are some of the most adorable felines I’ve ever been around. It’s obvious that they’ve quickly become socialized, as they enjoy attention and have no fear of humans. I would love to find happy homes for them.

I’m still trying to find out what has happened to the mother. If I had to do it all over again, I would have left the family in the backyard for another few weeks, until the kittens were fully grown. I don’t know whether I’ve done the right thing, but I do know that I’ve had the best intentions all along, and I hope that my fostering parenting of these kittens will make it more likely that they will be adopted and loved.

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For those of you who haven’t read the previous post, here’s the backstory: a few weeks ago, my wife and I found a stray cat and her litter of newborn kittens in our backyard. I felt that I couldn’t let them stay there, but I feared that they would be euthanized if I brought them in to a shelter. Many commenters chimed in with wonderful suggestions and advice.

When I got back from my trip on Friday, the situation was unchanged: the mother and her kittens were still in the backyard, and I was still conflicted about what to do about them. Upon mac’s advice, I had contacted a few “no-kill” shelters. But it was difficult to find one that had room. Kitty Cottage, for instance, which I had deemed my best hope, told me that they couldn’t accept the cats.

I went back to the PACCA to rent a trap. I ran into a distraught man in who arrived cradling a small box in his hands. At one time, it had contained contractor garbage bags; now, it held a tiny kitten who could barely breathe. The man had found it on his construction site among a litter of deceased siblings. But PACCA couldn’t help — the man was told that the shelter could not accept the kitten because it was under two pounds (this is a shelter policy that I’ll discuss in further detail in a later post).

Two women, who had arrived carrying cages full of white rats, gave him the phone number of a woman in the area who bottle-feeds and rehabilitates sick and stray kittens. Then, they got into a heated argument with a man who told them that he feeds rats to his pet snake. The women, it turned out, run a rat rescue, and had come to the shelter to have their rats spayed. They seemed to know their way around the shelter scene, so I asked them what they thought I should do. They agreed that I should trap and turn in the cats — and that the PACCA was the right place to bring them. “It’s full of good people,” they told me.

So I rented the trap, came home. I put a small plate of food at one end of the trap, and went inside my house. I saw the mother enter the trap, but she managed to avoid pressing the step-lever which would close the front of the trap — she simply stood before it, and craned her head over the step to get at the food.

I opened the door, and the cat got nervous. As she turned around to get out of the trap, she mistakenly stepped on the lever, and the front door snapped shut.

It was a horrible moment. The cat, realizing that she had been trapped, backed frenetically towards the front of the long cage and lashed out at the steel barriers. She let out several loud, fearful moans. She would stay very still, and then spring at one of the walls of the cage, as if she could startle it into opening.

I spoke soothing words to her, but I didn’t know whether to believe them. Was everything going to be okay? Would she be taken care of? Or was she right to feel that a door had just shut her away from the life, freedom, and love that she had known?

I couldn’t answer those questions, but I had to get the kittens. They proved difficult to capture, but I eventually got all four of them in a box, and headed off to the PACCA with a heavy heart.

To be continued . . .

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It has been a while since I have written regularly on The Tattered Coat. A full explanation of my absence, and an announcement of some exciting news, will be coming soon.

In the meantime, I’m requesting your help with a moral drama that has been playing out in my backyard.

Some time ago, I noticed that a couple of stray cats from the neighborhood seemed abnormally interested in my yard. Figuring that these cats had simply been lured by the sultry scent of my beloved Luna, I didn’t give their plaintive cries and wanton yelps too much of a thought.

Mom

That all changed last week, when I discovered that one of these stray cats was a female, that she had recently given birth to a litter of kittens, and that they were all camped out behind an azealia bush, underneath a fence.

Jesus — could they be more cute?

Watching this mother feed her brood, my wife and I took pity on her, and started giving her a can of the good stuff every night. Though the mother has not quite warmed up to us, she’s hissing at us a little less often now.

I’ve tried to leave well enough alone, but, as the Dude said, this will not stand. For one thing, this mother seems to have two male cats staking out her turf, and they have been spraying all over our grill, our back steps, and our yard.

But my urge to do something about this mother and her kittens has less to do with the scent of these gentlemen callers than it does with the bigger problem of feral cats. If this website’s claims are correct, one pair of breeding cats “can exponentially produce 420,000 offspring over a seven-year period.”

That’s a lot of stray cats.

The most humane solution, it seems, is to follow the Trap-Neuter-Release method. The problem? The Philadelphia Animal Care and Control Association doesn’t support such a program. I can trap the cats and bring them in to be neutered, but each operation will cost $25, and the association doesn’t have any openings until September.

So, it seems that my options are these:

1. Leave the cats alone.

2. Trap the cats, bring them to the shelter, and hope that at least the little kittens will get adopted. It’s likely that the mother, at least, will be euthanized.

I feel that Option #2 is the right path to follow, but every time I think of bringing these cats in to the shelter, I shudder a little bit. Do I really want to be responsible for killing these animals?

And what is the morally and ethically responsible thing to do here?

a kitten awaits an uncertain fate

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In today’s mayoral race, I will be voting for Michael Nutter, and I encourage you to do the same.

Like many others, I’m troubled by Nutter’s “Stop and Frisk” proposal. But I’m voting for him for a few important reasons:

1. As my councilman in the 4th District, he was responsive to constituent concerns.
Nutter showed up on a regular basis to the meetings of my dinky little neighborhood association. He’d listen to concerns voiced by members of the community . . . and then he’d go out and get things done.

2. He has taken tough, and sometimes unpopular, stands.
Pushing on through countless setbacks, Nutter got the votes he needed to pass the smoking ban. And he did so by outmaneuvering his longtime adversary, Mayor Street, into a corner.

3. He’ll fight against the pay-to-play political culture of Philadelphia
As the Inquirer noted, “Nutter was the stubborn Don Quixote who brought his windmill down, forcing City Hall to confront the shame its chronic corruptions had spawned.”

4. Nutter is the only candidate who has children in the public schools.
This alone, I think, is reason enough to vote for Nutter: he is invested in the city itself, and is committed to solving its problems. Plus, how can you resist this commercial?

5. He is, as Joey notes, the smartest guy in the room.
And isn’t it about time that we had a man of real intellect running this city?

I hope you’ll join me today in voting for Michael Nutter, a candidate who has the vision, experience, character, integrity, and intelligence to lead this city towards a brighter future.

Update: YEAH!

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