We will have mostly amusement and persiflage today, as it’s the weekend and I’m working hard. With luck I can put up a science post in a bit.
In the meantime, I know you’re all on tenterhooks after reader Sheila B reported yesterday that she’d adopted a stray kitten. Well, an eight-month-old “kitten”—and pregnant, too! I of course demanded photos and a story, and she kindly obliged. Sheila’s report:
The finding:
I was lying in bed on Monday morning listening to the rain hammering on the window, as only Texas rain can do, thinking “What is that noise?” Get up, get umbrella, hope none of the neighbors see me in my nightgown, look around the front of the house. Can hear meowing, but can’t see anything. Go back in the house, out the back, meowing much louder and little face pops out from the gap between the fence and the shed. Enticed her out and under the porch. Fortunately it was warm outside so her only apparent discomfort was that she was hungry. We spent the next few days calling neighbors and checking websites for lost cats and buying cat food and litter. No-one seemed to be missing a cat and by the time we’d purchased a scratching post, we realized she was staying with us. Indeed, she has shown no inclination to leave! We took her to the vet to see whether she was chipped (she’s not), and to get her checked over. Apart from fleas, which the vet treated, she was otherwise in good health. And in the family way!
She is very friendly, very talkative, very playful (anything that moves is fair game) and we named her Zinnia. I say “we” because she has wormed her way into my husband’s affections, even though she stalks the fringed weights hanging from his prized Japanese scrolls.
Of course I will now request pictures of the kittens when they arrive.
Oh, my — she’s a real beauty!
b&
Sweet.
Ah, a wonderful story to wake up to.
Good MORNING, Sheila and Zinnia!
Calico!
She’s a very pretty cat! And, I gather, has personality.
Good for you, good for your husband (scrolls notwithstanding), and good for Zinnia.
Oooooh pretty kitteh!
Calicos are considered to bring good luck to the owner in Germany. Glückskatze!
I look forward to the kitten pictures!
She looks a lot like the calico who’s been living on my back porch since July 2. Luckily, my guest isn’t pregnant and hasn’t been in heat since she arrived. I can’t let her in because she HATES other cats and I already have 2 resident goddesses. My big concern is winter. Minnesota isn’t the best place to live outdoors for 5-6 months of the year. Zinnia is a lucky girl! And, yes, kitteh pics would be appreciated.
A feral cat of similar appearance adopted my wife and me. The thing we like about her is, she is dependably undependable, thus predictable, in some strange way.
True cat logic, there.
What a great story! What a cute kitteh!
Beautiful kitteh, I hope the kittens aren’t too many.
I need someone to talk me out of getting another cat, please! I saw this beauty at the pet store today that was brought in from the shelter. Pure white, gorgeous little girl. Help! :/
(The cat in the pic is very pretty, reminds me of a kitty I had many years ago.)
Calico cats are awesome. I’m certain of this even though my sample size is 1.
Congratulations, Sheila! You got a whole lotta lovin’ comin’ on!
Such a l;ovely stroy and Daisy may has been sitting here reading and watching me work. Dasiy Masy being a shorthair adopted black n white 10 years old. She would love to befriend Zinnia. And asked Zinnia if she would like to come to see my blog where
she can follow all my adventures. Meowwws and purrrrrs Daisy May puss cat
Congratulations! Zinnia is lovely. Something special about calicos and torties…
Eight months old and already pregnant? That proves it, cats and tribbles are related.
Thank you for featuring my little girl, who even though I have known her for less than a week, has already curled her beautiful tail around my heart.
To Jerry and all who asked for pictures of the kittens, I have to tell you that after considering many factors, mainly Zinnia’s young age and small size, advice from the vet and what we feel is our lack of ability to care for and reliably re-home an unknown number of kittens, we have decided to have the vet terminate Zinnia’s pregnancy (she is at most halfway through her gestation according to the vet’s estimate) and spay her at the same time.
If we had been able to plan for Zinnie’s arrival, things might have been different, but we have some long-standing travel plans at a time when the kittens would need a lot of attention, and I don’t know how we would make reliable provision for them while we are away, other than giving them to our local shelter, which always seems to be full of cats. I am so sorry!
Zinnia has her surgery scheduled for tomorrow morning and we can take her home on Tuesday, assuming all goes well. It’s hard not to be anxious!
Thank you for being so open about this, Sheila, hard as it is. I had been wondering if the vet would suggest this. I’m sorry too. I hope everything goes without a hitch.
A difficult decision, to be sure, but not one to feel guilty about, if you can manage to do so.
We have plenty of cats and are in no danger of running out. The challenge is to give the ones already in this world long and happy lives, not to see how many more cats we can cram into shelters or turn loose on the street only to live lives that are nasty, brutish, and short. By spaying Zinnia, you’re doing exactly what needs be done about both.
You might keep an eye out for the would-be father. Even if there’s no way to bring him in off the street, the right thing to do is trap him, neuter him, nick a bit off the tip of his ear as a sign that that’s been done, and let him back where he came from. He won’t have an ideal life as an indoor cat, but he’ll still have a decent life as a feral cat…and he’ll do his bit to keep your local feral cat population in check.
See http://www.alteredtails.org/tnr/ for details.
Cheers,
b&
Thank you Ben and Smoked Paprika.
It’s unlikely that we will see the tom that impregnated Zinnia. This is only the second cat I’ve seen in our neighborhood in the nine years we’ve lived here. All of the cats I know of are kept indoors. We will never know for certain, but we think it likely that someone deliberately dropped Zinnie off here. One of our former neighbors was known to rescue animals and has had unwanted pets left in her yard before. Because Zinnie is well socialized and in good health, I can only imagine someone perhaps felt they couldn’t afford to keep her any longer.
Thanks for the link, Ben. It prompted me to find my local TNR organization.
Best of luck and lots of happy times with Zinnia, Sheila. Because of you and your family, she’ll have a good life now.
Final update on Zinnia:
I just called the vet’s office and Zinnia is now spayed and awake. Turns out she wasn’t pregnant after all!!. All that angst for nothing!
Looking forward to taking her home tomorrow 🙂
Yay!
Oh, I hope that’s not the final update on Zinnia!
But glad that everything is going well. If you’ve made it this far, the rest should go smoothly as well.
…and, while I’m thinking of it: one more thing to consider: health insurance for her. There are a number of providers, but I can’t recommend Pets Best highly enough. Your premium will cost about as much as you should be spending on her annual exam and vaccinations and the like, and it’ll pay for most of those costs. Then, if anything bad happens, it’ll pay for most of the rest. Typically, there’s a deductible per incident / disease / condition / whatever, and then they pay 80% of everything after that. It’s such that you can tell the vet to not worry about the cost, because even the very expensive stuff isn’t going to set you back much.
Pets Best lost a lot of money on Tamar, but I’m doing everything I can to make sure they make a huge profit off of Baihu. So far, all is going according to plan….
Cheers,
b&
Great suggestion! Thank you!!