Failure to Thrive

One of the four little orange kittens is not thriving as the other three are. She is clingy and cries a lot. She does not have diarrhea, but is having the hardest time of the four in switching from the bottle to a mix of wet food and KMR. I hope she makes it. She is just so sweet.

Slurpy is missing Prancer and Tabitha. I knew she would. But, on the other hand, she has taken over as "mom" of all the other kittens. She takes this job very seriously.

I think about six cats will be fixed tomorrow. I'm not that sure, because once again, I could not get ahold of the "main" sister, of two sisters, each with cats who need fixed. Last I saw her, a couple days ago, she had found three kittens on a porch of a neighbor who had moved out. Two were dead and one was alive. The kitten was one or two days old only, I swear. I told her it is very hard to keep them alive when they are that young.

I don't know where the mom is. The woman thinks the neighbor who moved may have the mother cat and may not have known, when she took her, that she had just had kittens. Or, they found her having kittens, and put the newborns outside, and left with the cat. Or, a stray mom had the kittens on that landing and was disturbed in the process and ran off. I don't know. Nobody over there does.

That's a lot to take on, a two day old kitten. She'd already fallen in love with him. He was a strong little bugger, that's for sure.

I stopped in at the Corvallis colony, where I got 17 cats fixed and then they took Martha, Peter and James. They said Peter is really warming up to them. He was the tamer of the two, while James was smaller and wilder and Martha was very feral. They see Martha in the late evening. They gave me some flowers from their beautiful garden. The mother and daughter were looking good. The daughter is feeling so much better, after a chronic digestive illness and they have really cleaned up the house and property. Both were in good spirits. I stopped in to give them a bag of cat food, which started the mother into a little happy dance. Made me feel good.