After lots of investigating, emails, and phone calls, I finally found a no-kill shelter with slots for the two kittens, and as of tonight, they’re hanging out with other cats and in no immediate danger of being euthanized, tormented, run over, or eaten. It took some doing, and I’m relieved: I couldn’t rightly conscience letting two young beings I’d had in my care chance easy harm or death. Tink and Zeugma don’t miss them — well, maybe Tink, a little — but I do.
Especially with kittenish behavior like this wonder at the glories of the carousel microwave:
OMG!! It has soundz AND movez AND foodz! WANT!!!1!!1!
And I’ll be volunteering for a few hours a week at that no-kill shelter, starting tomorrow morning.
LOLcats in a New Home
Good on ya, Mike.
It was awesome. Lots of work, with forty or so kitties in two rooms, but awesome. Feed cats, clean boxes, clean cages, attend to cats, clean floors, and the hours just zipped away. But I got to be nice to many cats this morning.
You know, I think there’s a minimum amount of cats per house. At ours it’s four, with a dog (down from two dogs and five cats actually). Only two of the cats are allowed into the yard. The other two are semi-feral and we may never see them again. One maybe, the other, too dicey, as much as they would both like to see the great outdoors of our backyard (fended well enough for the dog and the lazy cat, but not energetic, skinny cats). The good thing is that kittens, if your shelter is like ours, tend to get adopted. It’s the older ones who end up under the gun.
I agree about the older ones. Susan Darling over at Wildrun.blogspot.com runs photos of all of the cats at her shelter, at the older ones are there year in and out, it seems.
I got Gizmo when he was 5 (i.e., old cat) and wouldn’t trade him for the world. He’s 17 and spoiled out of his mind. Old cats rock because they already know how to use the litter box and not run away (this morning not included).
Yeah. There are lots of older cats at the Beacon shelter, and so sometimes it’s a heartbreak — one, Agatha, is seven years old and has a thyroid disorder, and so she’s super-skinny and always hungry and a little feeble, and I have to be gentle when I take her out of the cage and put her near some wet food and she’s happy; another, Annie, is wonderful and full of love for people, but has a bad habit of spraying, and so has been returned to the shelter multiple times, and her cage is always a bit of a mess to clean up. And we keep getting more and more black kittens, and people adopt the grays and the oranges and the calicos, but nobody wants any of the (at my last count) nine tiny black kittens we have at the shelter now. Of course, the two biggest boys — Joey, an enormous old gray longhair, and Ben, a large, muscular young ginger — make sure they keep up a constant dispute over who’s in charge. And there are a couple ferals who never come out of their hiding spots while humans are around. But I’ve got to admit, I’ve never enjoyed emptying cat boxes and scrubbing and sweeping and mopping quite so much, in exchange for the amount of attention they ask for and purr at.