Tortie Tuesday: Then There Was One

I'm not sure that Serena would even cooperate with the idea of posting about the kittens. The day after our last cat post went live, the smallest of the three surviving kittens died. 

The kittens were not dark three-colored cats, or "Torties." They weren't even mostly-white three-colored cats, or "Calicos," like their amazing grandmother Serena. They were white with varying amounts of black on top. Above you see the smallest kitten approaching Silver. When the picture was actually snapped, he had about a week to live.

The middle-sized male lived almost another month...up to the next major glyphosate poisoning episode.

He lived just long enough to accept a name. Because (when viewed from some angles) the black patch on his back looked like a letter E, he was the E-Cat. Whether this E might have been short for "Easy" or "Explorer" was never determined.

Whether he was going to become a really social cat, I can't say. Serena "socialized" her daughter's kittens quite effectively--gently, like the gracious Queen Cat she is, with extra slurps of milk to reward or encourage target behaviors. 

You have to watch a social cat rearing kittens to believe it. "Herding cats" is usually used as a metaphor for something that can't be done. Social mother cats make it easy. Serena reared her kittens, and then in turn her daughter Silver reared her kittens, out on the porch but Serena wanted them indoors at night for security, after they started toddling out of their nest. So every night, about sundown, I'd look outside and there would be the kittens all lined up in a well-fed, docile, sleepy little row (or if I was late it might be a pile), waiting to be taken in for the night. Every morning, about sunup, they'd line up at the door and wait to be taken out for breakfast. 

Before Serena's own four kittens started eating solid food, they had feline enteritis. Serena brought them to me with what must have been some sort of instruction in good manners. They were too small and too sick to get into much mischief, but they didn't seem interested in mischief anyway. Baby kittens have a good sense of time (their stomachs tell them when it's been four hours) and this litter would toddle out of their basket and line up for meds at what should have been their meal time, then go back and curl up in the basket until the next meal time.

And Serena's great-great-grandmother was one of a litter, just one generation removed from a city alley, who used to line up in order to be groomed and petted: the year-old cats first, then the autumn kittens who were the near-adult cats' half-siblings, then the five spring kittens who were one of the near-adult cats' babies. There was an order in which the spring kittens lined up for attention, too. The feral-born generation of that family seemed stricter about etiquette-with-humans than later generations, who were more familiar.

So this spring Serena had five kittens of her own. None lived long enough to leave the nest and nibble at kibble. Silver then had four kittens, but had some trouble nursing them, at first, so for a few days Serena was feeding two separate litters. Then there was only the one litter: four mostly white kittens with black spots, four different sizes. Then Silver's smallest kitten, the female, died. Then the next smallest.

Then E-Cat. 

Everyone around the Cat Sanctuary knew why they died. None of them had enteritis. None of them had Manx Syndrome. All of them died during glyphosate reactions. Humans had those reactions, too. For some of them the Department of Transportation, the Southern Railroad Company, and a couple of other people were to blame, but what kept Silver's three sons from growing up was that Professional Bad Neighbor I mentioned in a previous post. Ratbag sprayed a field close to the Cat Sanctuary daily after being told that glyphosate vapors made me sick. Defoliated the Incredible Feral Peach Tree on the property line. Completely killed several old apple trees. Berry harvests were drastically reduced (and unfit to eat), and even the possum wouldn't eat the peaches that fell off the Incredible Feral Peach Tree as leaves began to grow back on some of its branches. When a possum leaves peaches on the ground, you know something is badly wrong--in fact this possum, Dorsa with the dark dorsal stripe, lost its companion, Parva the smaller possum, in June. Most of the medicinal and ornamental flowers in the not-a-lawn did eventually bloom, but flowers appeared late, stunted and runty, some off color. Fire blight claimed several plants and trees that were not directly sprayed. The adult cats felt the effects of glyphosate poisoning. 

One day in July a lot of poisonous vapor had built up in the air. I'd leaned over and been sick in the yard myself so I couldn't blame Serena when she was sick on the steps. I mopped the step with one of those "pet odor eliminator" products sold in big-chain stores, then popped a couple of charcoal capsules from Wal-Mart into a cup of water, stirred until the water looked black, and gave each cat a dose--5 cc's for each adult, 2 cc's for each kitten. 

The trouble was that this set a precedent. 

Silver, Serena, and Sommersburr managed to control themselves for the rest of the summer, but every time the little guys felt sick, they'd wait for me to come out on the porch and then very deliberately, looking right at me, they'd try to make a mess. (They did not always succeed; sometimes E's and Daisy Chain's reactions included spastic colon.) No amount of scolding or putting them off the porch ever broke this behavior pattern. They were hoping I'd give them more of the home remedy that had helped them feel better the first time. 

Unfortunately you can't use charcoal, or give it to animals, every day; it adsorbs and cleanses nutrients out of the digestive system, as well as poisons and bacteria. E and Daisy Chain had a malnourished look from the day they were born, and never did look as if they were the same age as the biggest kitten, Burly. Before they died I was starting to wonder whether feeding them was even humane. They spent so many of their days feeling sick. 

So I'd scold them, put them off the porch, tell them to go to the sand pit. Daisy Chain was especially likely to run right back out and plop his scraggy, ribby, stomach-bloated little self down on the toe of my shoe, nonverbally saying, "But you really want to pick me up and snuggle me, because I'm cute." E would then plop across my shoe too, not to be outdone. Burly would usually sit down, a yard or two away, and watch with an air of calm superiority as the smaller kittens acted like babies. (Burly snuggles if he feels like it, but has never solicited snuggling.) 

In this snapshot Burly was waiting for one of the smaller ones to run around a corner and be chased. I may have one of his watching them snuggle, with calm superiority, somewhere.

Kittens bounce and pounce when they're not actually near death, though, and Burly seemed to enjoy his brothers' company. They enjoyed his. Of course they weren't as big, as strong, or as fast as he was. They seemed to have a good time trying to work out ways to compensate. When the racing and chasing led to play-fighting, the smaller ones seemed to start it.

On his last day E seemed to be mature enough to have some idea what was happening; he followed me around, soliciting snuggles, not trying to foul the porch. Overnight his skinny little body seemed to have turned into a bag of bones with a bloated stomach. Around sundown it seemed to me that Serena was telling him, "Go to the human for one last cuddle," and he did. It was hard to be sure, because E was chilly, losing the ability to warm his own feet, and stayed on my lap long enough that Serena seemed to lose patience and start nonverbally telling me, "Enough is enough! He's dying but there's no need to be foolish about it." 

Burly participated in the porch-soiling game only once when his brothers were doing it, but last night he did it again. He made a big point of pulling one plastic grocery bag out of a bag full of them, spreading it out on the porch, and squatting on it, as some intelligent cats will do when they choose to "think outside the litter box." The mess looked normal. 

The lonely only kitten, I knew...wanted attention, wanted to be chased, wanted to be caught and dosed with charcoal. Silver and Serena are still young cats, fairly frisky when not reacting to poison, but not bouncy kittens any more. Who knows whether cats even have ways of communicating to each other, as Serena might well do, "Cheer up--you'll live--I was a lonely only kitten too." 

Being an only kitten gave Serena more milk, and more indoor time, and the chance to work out a sort of language she used to "talk" to me. It helped to make her the big strong clever cat she is. She didn't like it, though. Given the chance to play with another kitten of the same age, she never looked back.

In my hand Burly still felt like a good-sized kitten, not fat but with sturdy bones and muscles. How long that will last, who knows. The season when "weeds" grow back after being sprayed, cut, burned, or even stepped on is over. For the Professional Bad Neighbor, spraying glyphosate has nothing to do with the "weeds." 

We need laws about this. Laws with teeth in them, about the property being automatically awarded to the complaining victim and the former property owner spending a minimum number of years physically cutting back vegetation along road verges.