Since this will be my last column for the year of 2021, I went through my notebook to compile some statistics. I try my best to log in everything I do, but I may forget once in a while. However, the numbers are pretty accurate. Drumroll please!
Did you miss me? I didn’t write a column last month because my personal life has been in chaos.
For the past few months, I have been caring for a dear friend of over 25 years. She was diagnosed with stage four cancer and was basically in hospice. She also has an adult son who is autistic. She needed a lot of help and her family members were some distance away. Even though I was a little slow because of my foot, I spent a lot of time helping her.
Shortly after last month’s column, I had my foot surgery. I tried to empty out my kittens rooms beforehand, but alas, that didn’t happen. So I had to hobble around starting the day after surgery, and it wasn’t easy. I am not going to sugar coat it. It was really hard caring for thirteen kittens, and the new mom and her three babies while literally hopping around on one foot. I used crutches for the first week, but it was cumbersome. I would prepare the food bowls for each room and then carry them in on a large tray.
June ended with me still having nineteen kittens and one mother cat. The amount of work required to maintain all these cats and still have a nice smelling house is staggering. Up at 6 a.m. to feed and scoop, which takes about two hours. I generally hit the sack around midnight. Why so late? Because in addition to taking care of the kittens, I have a ton of other things to do each day. I have several “side hustles” to pick up some extra cash, a home and yard to maintain, and ongoing TNR projects. You know, a life, lol! But I take my rescue efforts very seriously. I am aware that some people may think I’m “crazy” to do so much work “for nothing.”
The end of May was both uplifting and encouraging even with a hiccup or two. The day after I finished last month’s column, I stopped to feed my small colony and was perturbed to see a kitten. I had not seen any pregnant cats out there. One kitten turned out to be four kittens. They were scared, but it was clear that they were not feral. If they were born feral, there would be no way I would have been able to grab them by hand. Granted, I did have to crawl through some bushes, but I was not leaving any behind. Plus, they were flea-free, very unusual with cats born in the wild.
Kitten season is in full swing and the work is non-stop. The calls, texts and messages come in every single day. Sometimes I can help, but as I have been saying as of late, “I’m only one person!” I just can’t save them all. It is hard to say “no” but I only have so much room and time.
Kitten season has arrived with its usual tsunami of kittens. In addition, a lot of pregnant cats have come my way. I think this is in part due to two things. Number one is the sheer cost of fixing one’s pet is extremely high. Low cost alternatives are sometimes available but often require traveling, which is an obstacle for some people. I realize that if you can’t afford to fix your pet, you should not get one, but unfortunately, many people don’t have that much forethought.
Last month I began installing cameras so that I will be able to see the miscreants whose twisted sense of what is the right thing to do leads them to drop off cats on my property. All sides of the property will be covered, so hopefully no one will be tempted to dump their cats on me any longer.
This past month, the cat business has been brisk. At the top of the list of things to do is the installation of security cameras. Two large male cats showed up in my yard about a month ago. I believe them to be male because they have those typical softball-sized heads. I’m not sure they arrived together because they don’t seem to like each other. So far efforts to trap them have proved futile.
This time last month I was up to my eyeballs in cats and kittens. Noodles, Klinger, and Vivienne were no longer containable in the bathtub, and my husband, though extremely tolerant of sharing the bathroom, was growing weary of their antics. There was the usual unrolling of the toilet paper, scattering of cat litter on the floor, and the emptying of the waste basket onto the floor, but when they started jumping on the legs of the unlucky seated person, things got serious. I clipped all their sharp little claws, but they were still inflicting scratches on those brave enough to enter. We have two bathrooms, but the second one is small and also had a cat in it.
