Bosco is Dead

I woke up just now, 5:30 a.m.. I'd fallen asleep on the couch watching TV. I went in to check on Bosco, who is in the spare bedroom with his mother. Bosco was dead. I found him laying on the floor behind the rabbit hutch, where he would try to nurse on his mom, only mom didnt' want anything to do with him. She would let the kittens lay with her, at least.

He looked like he might have fallen off the shelf above him. But it's only a foot off the ground.

He was half the size of the other two, who went to a home last night. I e-mailed the woman who adopted them. I hope they did not also die. Distemper can kill a kitten overnight. I worry about taking kittens to a large clinic, as I did last week with them, for fear of what they might get exposed to there when so tiny without functioning immune systems.

I hope it was not distemper. They had been vaccinated, but only a first vaccination, which doesn't protect a kitten that young at all. They have to have at least a second vaccination, to produce antibodies to the first.

If the other two are ok, then it wouldn't have been. He didn't hang out with the other two even, but would huddle alone. I had a box for him in the bedroom next to the heater. However, I never saw him in the box.

Bosco was half the size of the other two kittens and had, as we rescuers say "failed to thrive". While the other two were plump and normal size for the age, Bosco was neither.

The rancher told me he had taken this kitten home for awhile and showed it to his wife and thought about keeping him, but then finally took him back. I wonder, if the seperation from his mother and siblings for that long, when too young, did him in. Or maybe she just never accepted him back, or found him again, once the rancher put him back out there. He had said the kittens head was way too big for his body. He returned him I believe about a week before I ended up out there trapping.

The first day I went out to the barn, I had seen the two gray tux kittens desperately darting out of the hay bales to eat dry food from a bag broken open on a bale. The barn owners wife had told me they had forgotten to get dry food, so the cats at the barn had not had food for about three days or more.

Bosco had not been dead very long when I found him this morning, but he's dead nonetheless.

All the cats from that barn are heavily infested in both round and tapeworms. He got Revolution the day I trapped him, which was last Monday and it was killing his roundworms. I'd see them dead in the healthy looking kitten poop in the litterbox.

I do not know what killed Bosco.