In this blurry photo, Serena is closest to the barrels, keeping an eye on her four adorable kittens, two of whom are in the picture. The big dark blur closest to the camera is Serena's late lamented foster brother Traveller. Although Trav did everything but nurse the kittens, he gave no sign of having matured enough to be their father. (I think their father was a neighbor's black-and-white alley cat.) The two kittens in between the two year-old cats are Felix and Black Stache. The distance at which you see them is about as far apart as they've ever willingly been.
As this web site mentioned rather often, the four adorable kittens were available for adoption. Some local lurkers, baby-boomers, liked Stache's funny little face.
I liked that little face too, especially when, in the seventeenth week of her life (last week), Stache discovered her purr-power.
Neither Samantha nor Serena has really used their purr-power to enchant humans very often. Stache acted as if she thought pawing at my feet and purring to make me pick her up and pet her was a brand-new idea she had invented all by herself.
Of course, anything Stache did, Felix had to copy. Social kittens color-match--I think for camouflage. When they stuck close together and purred in unison, they might have looked and sounded like one larger, less vulnerable animal.
This was the first thing only two of the four kittens had done. Generally the four kittens have moved as one unit. They are well disciplined--for an adolescent single mother Serena's shown remarkable competence; most nights they lined up outside the door and waited to be taken in to bed, and if one of them wanted to make a last run to the sand pit, that one would find itself alone, and would rush in to be put in "Cat Jail" for the night. They don't like being caged at night. They accept it as something their mother and human godmother have told them is for their protection. What none of them has ever tolerated is being separated from the others.
Anyway, a reader who'd got down to one surviving tomcat, nine years old, realized that at any moment she might become catless and wanted Stache.
On Saturday morning one of her children, who are baby-boomers a few years older than I am, popped up and said, "I can take that kitten now."
"Not all by herself," I said. "Social cats have to be adopted at least in pairs. Stache goes with Felix."
"I'll take both of them," said the reader's adult child.
"Er um are you sure you want to take them today? They're still a close-knit little family," I stalled.
"My mother is in town this weekend," said her adult child.
Well, as this web site observed with regard to Grandma Bonnie Peters, Mothers Day is whenever the surviving mothers of baby-boomers say it is. Now that few of us have mothers at all, those of us who do are not inclined to keep them waiting. So I popped Stache and Felix into a carrying cage, secured them on the floor of the visitor's truck, and said, "If they don't totally fall in love at first sight, you can always bring the kittens back. They will be missed."
So of course the reader fell in love with Stache and Felix at first sight, and after a couple of tinned cat treats they apparently began to think about the benefits of having laps of their very own to curl up on, and the prospect of living with two cat-friendly humans in a new house began to appeal to them. Some Cat Sanctuary graduates have cried and felt homesick on their first night in their Purrmanent Homes. Stache and Felix apparently thought, "Just as long as we're together...and the food's good around here!"
Should people who are eighty years old adopt kittens? If the adult child living with them wants to keep the house and its resident cats, they totally should adopt kittens. Kittens adopted by great-grandparents can provide some comforting continuity for the great-grandparents when their old cats pass on, and later, perhaps, for the grandparents, parents, and children in the family when the great-grandparents do. I expect Stache and Felix will lead stable, comfortable lives.
But when the reader's adult child drove away and I walked back through the front yard, Samantha nonverbally said "How could you!"
"How dared you!" Serena hissed. "Those were my babies, mine!"
"They'll be all right," I assured the cats. "Either they'll be back here, tonight, or they've found a good home for themselves."
"But I miss them," Samantha nonverbally said. "I've become quite attached to my grandkittens." Samantha induced lactation, probably for birth control purposes, when Serena started weaning the kittens. Her milk production is now approaching its peak, the stage where Samantha looks hollow because she can hardly take in enough food and water to convert into milk. She spends a fair bit of time literally attached to the kittens.
"I miss them too," I admitted.
"You know nothing about it!" Serena, seated in her place of honor at the top of the stack of storage bins on the porch, glared down at me, thumping her tail on the bins. "Traitor! Homewrecker! Catnapper! Those are my son and my daughter! You never even asked me!"
Most cats seem to resign themselves to the idea that humans are alien lifeforms whom they can, at best, train to serve food and groom those hard-to-reach places. Social cats, however, have a strong sense of etiquette--however alien to ours it is--and they definitely like to be asked nicely about anything.
"Well, I apologize," I said. "After humans get to be eighty years old, we don't like to keep them waiting. One day perhaps you'll understand how that is. Anyway Silver and Swimmer aren't going anywhere...You realize some cats who lived here found homes for kittens the age of these kittens, if humans hadn't done it? Heather was the hunter who brought in squirrels and rabbits, and she also hunted for homes for her kittens and placed some of them in new homes, herself. People who knew who she was from reading my web site knew she had a home of her own and was giving them the honor of adopting her kittens. Other people thought she was a feral cat who wouldn't get close to them, herself, but let them adopt her kittens."
"Hmph!" Serena spat. "I may have normal-shaped feet, but I'm a better mother than Heather was."
Later the reader's adult child returned the carrying cage. "They all like each other. As we speak my mother and sister are watching those kittens run all over my house. They've been giving them new names and arranging for their operations..."
"We miss them," I said. "Especially that cat who's giving us the evil eye now--their mother. She had completely weaned them, but she misses them."
"She'll get over it," the adopter's adult child said uneasily.
The relationship may be reparable, I thought. Social cats do seem to have a concept of forgiveness. But it would be a mistake to imagine that social cats just forget things from day to day, as some normal cats seem to do. Serena probably will have other kittens--though not, I hope, this year--and probably will find my help convenient. But she's making her disapproval felt, with resentful looks, tail twitches, an absolute refusal to relax against my knee or let me pick her up. I sent her kittens away without even asking her? What sort of outrage might I think of next?
Serena was born in the office; as the only surviving kitten of a premature litter, she grew up literally too close to me for comfort. Though she was delighted to transfer her friendship to Traveller when he moved in, there's been a sort of family feeling between her and me. Now it's gone.
The hold on Silver's and Swimmer's adoption is not entirely due to Serena's feelings, or to the fact that Samantha's induced lactation cycle is approaching its peak. Silver and Swimmer look very much alike except that, week by week, the size gap has increased. Silver is a big strong healthy kitten. Swimmer has grown, matured, bounced and romped, but it's (I suspect she's) still much thinner and less energetic than the other three kittens. Will extra milk solve this problem? The kittens happily nibbled their way through enough pumpkin seeds to kill most internal parasites, but will special medicine to eliminate tapeworms help? Or is Swimmer sensitive to glyphosate, as Traveller apparently was, and likely to drop dead if someone sprays poison in the neighborhood one morning and rain fails to arrive that afternoon? Remains to be seen. If nobody had adopted the black-and-white kittens I would have considered letting someone with experience rearing sickly kittens have the grey-and-white ones. As things are, they're not going anywhere.
Amazon link? I thought of a few books that seemed relevant to the topic of possessive mother animals who don't want their babies to be adopted. They also seemed too controversial and too depressing for a Tortie Tuesday post. Mudpie, our tortie e-friend, came to the rescue with a nice whimsical mystery novel link. It's not about cats as such; in this novel a human character rescues rabbits.
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