Saturday, September 24, 2011

The Latest Project

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Found on a nature trail and brought into the clinic by a good Samaritan.

I think he's a male, but not positive; tiny kittens are difficult to sex. His eyes should open any day now.

Judging by the area he was found, his mother is probably a feral. She may have been startled and dropped him, or was planning to return to get him later. So we'll never know if he was truely 'abandoned'. But you never know. We had another 'orphaned' kitten brought in a few months ago where the mother (a feral, though apparently healthy) left one of her kittens in a bush near an apartment and didn't come back for over 24 hours. A person couldn't stand looking at it anymore and took it in and started bottle feeding. Three days later the mother returned to the bush and sniffed around like, "huh, didn't I leave something here?"

Maternal instinct is a variable thing. At worse, he was saved from being a feral cat. I told him, on his first night here, as he spat out the rubber bottle nipple over and over and cried for the real thing, that life is tough sometimes and he would just have to get used to it and things would work out. Maybe he understands this, because now, two days later, he thinks formula and rubber nipple are just fine and dandy.

He'll be ready to go to a new home in five to six weeks.


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Me: "Will you hold him while I make up his bottle?"
Tom: "Will he poop on me?"
Me: "He can't poop on his own yet. So unless you plan to lick his genitals to stimulate that, you should be fine."
Tom: "Wasn't planning on it."

1 comment:

BorderWars said...

Kittens are so cute, too bad that they grow up into Cats.