The Zen Leaf

We’ve had no luck trapping the adult cats in the nearby feral colony this week. Well, one night, the mother of these kittens did go into the trap, but somehow it didn’t go off! Ugh! We’re going to try again tonight, but we’ve already contacted the SAFCC to let them know the situation is particularly difficult given that it’s not our colony that we’re trying to trap. They’re looking for a specialized group to come help us, to go and talk to the people at the house directly.

Most of this post is about the kittens. It has been one crazy week since my last post. The kittens were not particularly well, and were waiting on the Tuesday vet visit to figure out where to go with them. Reaper was in the worst shape, as she wouldn’t eat anything. We were having to force-fed her both pedialyte and kitten replacement milk every couple hours, despite the fact that she was completely weaned and old enough to be on solid food. She was extremely sweet, purring every time we held her, and all she wanted was to be carried (for warmth, I’m sure!). She was skin and bones, weighing barely over a pound when she was supposed to be 2 lbs at her age.

The rest of the kittens had begun to perk up by Monday. The arrival of Gherkin really helped. Maybe it was just having the entire litter together again, or maybe it was the fact that Gherkin was seriously into food and wrestling, but everyone (except Reaper) began to eat and play a lot more. All the kittens began to gain weight pretty fast – they were all underweight – except of course Reaper. Even with the force-fed milk, she was losing. So on Monday, we began syringe-feeding her chicken baby food instead. She didn’t like that, and it got everywhere, but she needed the calories! And it worked. Tuesday morning, she began to eat baby food on her own, voraciously, as well as crunchy kitten food. It was like she’d gotten so hungry that she lost all hunger signals, but with enough force-fed food, she wanted to eat All The Things. She’s still a lot smaller than the other three, but she’s been gaining 50-100 grams a day, which is awesome!

The kittens saw the vet Tuesday morning. I was wrong before – all four of them went in together. They had physical exams, fecal tests (they all have roundworms, as expected), and Reaper had some bloodwork done. Sadly, this showed that the kittens are FeLV positive, which means probably the entire feral colony is as well. It’s devastating. We have to be extra careful not to expose the kittens to our adult cats. And feline leukemia is a particularly tricky virus – the vet didn’t expect Reaper to last through the end of the day, much less the end of the week, given her rapid decline. Then there’s the question of how we’re going to get homes for these babies – will a shelter take them? Will we be able to find someone who will give them love and care, rather than euthanizing them? We did finally find a shelter in Austin – Austin Pets Alive – that will take in FeLV+ kittens, and have been talking with them. Fingers crossed! Obviously, they can’t stay locked in the one room forever, but they also can’t join our house, or go back out into the feral colony!

Socializing is going well – slow and steady. In the beginning, the kittens let us pick them up and pet them. Now, they are less afraid of us, so more willing to run away or try to escape if we hold them. So begins Phase Two. We started opening up the playpen for them to run around the room, getting used to us being in the same room. They would play – they love the Cat Dancer – but if one of us moved or shifted or made an unexpected sound, they’d run to hide somewhere. I kept playing with the Cat Dancer, and holding my fingers out to let them sniff if they wanted, and eventually (Friday), Reaper and Angus were willing to come near my hand to sniff. If I tried to touch them, they’d run, but it was a start! We’ll keep working on this.

In the meantime, the kittens have made some great leaps forward. Angus and Reaper have started purring and coming to my hand in the playpen when they want food. Gherkin finally purred for the first time. Reaper has started playing with my fingers as if they’re toys. Angus and Reaper will sometimes let me pet them outside the pen if I go slow enough. Little things like that. They’re well on their way to being full socialized, non-feral, adoptable kittens, with that sad FeLV complication to think about. (Note: I don’t know very much about FeLV aside from what the vet gave us in info, but kittens can apparently fight off the virus, and while they tend to have somewhat compromised immune systems and live shorter lives than other cats, they can certainly live full, happy lives. They just need to be in a home that won’t risk spreading the virus to other cats!)

(Clockwise from top left: Ghost, Angus, Reaper, Gherkin)

I’m continuing on my summer semi-blog-break. This week, Jason’s parents came to visit for several days. Then on Friday morning, after a month on my bp meds, I had a sudden serious side effect that almost sent me into the hospital (bp dropped so low I nearly fainted, and my heart rate wouldn’t go above 51 bpm). That same evening, Jason got rear-ended (thankfully he and everyone else is fine). I still can’t walk on the foot with the maybe-broken toe, and I couldn’t even tell you when we were last able to clean the house. So yeah. Blog will continue to be on the back burner.

Last Sunday, I posted about the feral cat colony that no one has been taking care of at the house four doors down from me. (I also posted about other things, but consider that post Part 1 of the Feral series.) In the week since, I’ve learned a few things, and there’s been a lot of continued activity. I’ll break this into parts.

The House: First, I want to apologize. I made an assumption in last week’s post that I’ve found out since was wrong. I said that we suspected the man who lives at the junk-house is a hoarder, and that given the things I’ve heard him say (refer to original post), he’s also a horrible man. In talking with a neighbor this week, I learned that indeed the man who lives there is a hoarder – in fact, he was actually on Hoarders in 2012. I’ve never actually watched the show, but I sought it out to see what sort of situation we might be dealing with…and I discovered that the man I’ve seen at the house is NOT the owner. So the hoarder and the a$$hole are actually two different people. I’m not sure who the guy is that I’ve seen – it could be a relative or friend or just a handyman who helps out, because I always see him trying to fix the cars or board up windows etc.

But it’s not the owner as I assumed, and the owner/hoarder actually seems like a nice man, and I feel really bad for him. Hoarding is a devastating mental health problem. The reason I don’t watch shows like Hoarders because they feel exploitative. And hoarding clean-ups like that don’t just have happily ever afters. It’s clear the man has gone back to at least some of his habits in the nine years since his episode. So hopefully we can trap these ferals and TNR them and have at least one less thing he needs to worry about.

The Ferals: Ferals are hard to trap. They’re smart, and pregnant/nursing mothers are especially smart and wary. Here’s what we know of the colony. There are two Siamese female cats, one of whom is the mom of four kittens, one of whom is pregnant. The first is also injured, so we’ve been calling her Injured Mama. The second, we thought may have had her kittens, but we don’t believe so now as she continues to get bigger and her nipples are getting larger. The neighbor we’ve been working with also believes she’s pregnant. She’s the one we’ve had eating in our backyard. The two Siamese moms are a bonded pair, and they both look after the kittens. Then, there’s a large grey tabby who is likely the father of all the kittens.

(“Do you think I’m stupid?” // This was taken from across the street, very far away, and she’s still giving us that look.)

Lastly, there appears to be a slightly older kitten (maybe 12 weeks, but he might not be quite old enough for TNR) who is a grey tuxedo cat. He is not the sharpest hammer in the dishwasher, as Jason likes to say, and has gotten trapped four times. We originally thought that, as a kitten, we could try to socialize him too. He was on the edge of the social window, but we would try. Unfortunately, we moved him to the playpen we were using for the kittens after his first trapping, and he immediately escaped into our garage. We had to open the garage and let him go before he hurt himself. The second time he got trapped, we let him go, only to immediately have him set off the trap again, this time with one of the other kittens inside! We had to use a barrier to separate the two and then let him go so that we could capture the kitten! The third night, he got himself trapped again…like I said, not the sharpest of cats! Unfortunately, the others have watched this guy get trapped multiple times, and are staying away from the enticing food smells.

We’re currently taking a trapping break for a few days before we start again, to give them time to be less wary, to to let them have a few days of normal feedings again. I think we’re going to need to request the larger trap for the tabby and possibly Pregnant Mama too.

The Kittens: There are four grey/beige tabby kittens in the new litter, roughly 7-8 weeks old. We caught one last week and he didn’t do well, so after 24 hrs, we returned him to his litter. We waited a few days before going out to trap kittens again. On Monday, we caught Reaper and Ancho, whose name seems to have morphed into Angus over the week. On Tuesday, we caught Ghost. Ironically, the only one we didn’t catch was the one from last week! And his mom knew Jason was the cat-napper, because she kept getting between the two of the whenever he tried to catch him. But yesterday morning, the neighbor we’ve been working with (next door to the hoarder) caught the last kitten and we brought him home to the litter. His name is Gherkin, and all four siblings are reunited.

I’ve been posting the kittens’ stories on my Instagram, because a lot has happened since we caught the first two six days ago. As a brief summary:

• They are all underweight and dehydrated. There’s been a lot of vomiting/diarrhea, and we’ve been giving them probiotics with their food as well as Pedialyte supplements and (in Reaper’s case) force-fed syringe feedings of kitten replacement milk. (They are all weaned and can eat wet food without an issue, but their stomachs are used to whatever they can catch plus garbage scraps in the yard.
• Reaper, Ghost, and Angus have all begun purring, especially Reaper. They all let us cuddle them now. Gherkin lets us hold him but mostly because he’s very scared.
• Reaper is female, the others are all male. [Note: This is incorrect. After better inspection, we discovered Gherkin is also female. Vet confirms: two female, two male.]
• They’re just barely learning how to play. Play isn’t really part of feral life. Reaper is trying to show us she can play by biting/wrestling shirt collars when we hold her, ha!
• We have a vet appointment for one of them set up on Tuesday, at which point whatever worm/etc treatments the one gets, they’ll all get.

Hopefully this week, we’ll have some improved health for the kittens, more play, purrs from Gherkin, and weight gain from everyone. Hopefully we’ll also trap the other ferals and get them TNRed. I might post here, I might not. There’s quite a bit of other things going on right now – I either broke or severely sprained a pinky toe two nights ago (yes, I’m a walking catastrophe at the moment) and it’s solid purple, and I have a friend whose husband is going through a devastating medical situation. The kittens will also take up a huge chunk of my time. I have a few posts half-written that I plan to finish and post, but I think I’m going to continue on semi-break for now while things are really crazy here.

Y’all. This week was just…like being sucker-punched over and over. It was a rough week. My thoughts are chaotic and not quite together, so forgive me if I ramble a bit.

I suppose I should start with Tuesday, the night that I saw the kittens. Backstory: there’s a house four doors down from us that is a typical run-down, probably-a-hoarder kind of house, with boarded windows and junk everywhere on an overgrown lawn. The man who lives there is an a$$hole, and every time I’ve seen him, he’s been spouting horrible stuff like “you have to slap your b!tch to keep her in line.” Last August, a litter of Siamese-tabby cats was born there, and we didn’t know if they were feral or outdoor pets. I mean, how often do you see a litter of feral Siamese cats, right? Plus there were rusted metal cages all around the yard, and water/food bowls that…well, they had leaf litter in them instead of food, but maybe the guy was just gone? He wasn’t answering his door anyway… Jason and I didn’t think there was anything we could do. We’ve seen several of the Siamese cats in our yard since then – 10 months old and technically adults now – and it’s become clear that these aren’t pets. Especially once another batch of kittens showed up.

(two on the porch and one in the grass the night I first saw them)

We’ve talked to a lot of the neighbors since then. No, the man doesn’t take care of or feed the cats, and regards them as “not his problem” even though the feral colony seems to like his junk-yard as their home base. We all agree something needs to be done. One of the cats is injured and has an infected leg. There is feces all over the yard and the kittens are covered in bugs. It’s a horrible situation. We tried reaching out to Animal Care Services, and they can’t do anything, so they sent us to the SA Feral Cat Coalition. They think it’s great that we want to TNR the cats, but unfortunately, the colony lives four doors down. We have to try to move it closer. And that starts with feeding times.

Which leads us to Thursday. We put out food for the first time that morning. If y’all are on Tiktok, you’ll know the Oh No song. That song immediately popped into my head:

That is one heavily pregnant kitty. We think, anyway? Sigh. But it was a good sign that she came to eat here – she’ll know where there’s food, and hopefully figure out the eating schedule, and maybe we can trap/spay her before there’s another litter of kittens born!

That day, I just felt off all day. Partly, I’m still adjusting to a new medication, and most afternoons, I get so sleepy that I take a nap. On Thursday, while lying down, I suddenly had the image in my head from when Ash passed away two weeks ago, and it was like being hit in the stomach. I know it was because we’d heard from the vet that his ashes and memorials were ready to be picked up, but I’ve tried my best to fill my head with other images since then, so it really was a sucker-punch. Then in the evening, Pregnant Mama didn’t show up for food, and while that’s not unusual – we’ve only started putting it out – it felt like an ominous omen. Then Jason caught one of the kittens.

The goal was to catch all four kittens and rehabilitate them to make them adoptable while TNRing the adult cats. The kittens looked to be 6-8 weeks old. They were eating solid food, had their adult eye color, were steady on their feet, etc. They were likely weaned and safe to be separated from their mother. After Jason caught the first, the others wouldn’t come near him Thursday night. So we spent some time setting the baby up in a safe environment. He – I’ll just call him “he” for ease, though we couldn’t pick him up to check – didn’t hiss at us or anything, and let us pet him, but he was obviously terrified and lonely and didn’t understand what was happening to him. Jason had gone out to buy some additional supplies while I tried to calm the kitten and adjust him to his new situation (covering the enclosure, making sure the temp was comfortable, getting him food/water, etc, all without touching him at this point). We were up quite late, well past when I normally sleep, and when I did finally sleep, I spent six hours in broken dreams of horrific things happening to the kitten in the hours he was alone.

Then I woke up to the news that the male half of the Real Life Ghost Stories Podcast, Dan, had passed away suddenly due to an underlying health issue (most likely his congenital heart issue, though the part in parentheses is my speculation).

Talk about sucker-punch.

(posted to the FB group from a fellow mourner)

I mean, I wasn’t a friend of Dan’s. We chatted on Instagram sometimes, and had been on a RLGS Zoom together a year ago with a half-dozen other podcast fans, and sometimes commented on posts, etc. We weren’t friends. But I’ve spent hours and hours and hours listening, watching, and reading his and Emma’s content over the last 15 months or so. He was 36. He was posting on Instagram stories the day before. The news was shocking and horrific, and your brain does all the things brains do to try to make sense of the nonsensical, and then the outpouring of love and grief from fans all over the world…

Again, Dan wasn’t my friend. My grief is real, but it’s distant. It’s not nearly the grief that Emma and his family and his friends are going through. And in no way do I want to make this about me, and my feelings, and my grief. But I’m also not going to pretend that the entire day wasn’t disoriented and uneasy and filled with moments where I broke down and cried, because it was. I’ve dealt with death before, but not sudden death, not since I was a kid in sixth grade with a classmate who was accidentally killed while playing with what he thought was an unloaded gun. My brain struggled – is still struggling – to cope with the sudden absence of a person.

Then on top of that, things continued to get crazier. Mama Cat didn’t show up again on Friday morning. She showed up at noon, her belly now smaller and sagging. (Or another Siamese cat with similar markings showed up? It’s unlikely, though, since she went straight over to the place she’d gotten food the day before, even though there was no food out during that time.) So either she wasn’t pregnant, or there’s another batch of kitten-worms out there and we weren’t nearly fast enough to TNR before it was too late.

(left: Injured Mama in the junk-yard; right: comfort nursing)

And on top of that, when Jason went out to try to trap more kittens that night, he discovered that Injured Cat was also these kittens’ mother, and while they’re not nursing for food, they’re still comfort-nursing at the end of a solid-food meal. The baby in our care was not doing well. He’d eaten plenty, and he’d explored a bit of his enclosure, but he hadn’t pooped at all in a 24 hour period and he was still clearly distraught. After some debate, we decided to return him to his litter until we could get the proper trapping equipment to get the whole batch. (They were all delighted to see each other, crying for each other and then grooming each other, including Mom.) We plan to try to trap the four kittens, plus their mom, toward the end of this week. In the meantime, we’ll work on getting them to trust us in the evenings. Injured Cat lets Jason get within a foot of her without running, which is good.

All in all, Friday was NOT a good day, and this week has been chaotic and messy and painful. Yesterday wasn’t much better. Pregnant Mama showed up for breakfast, and now looks like she may or may not ever have been pregnant, and we just can’t tell. We don’t know if it’s safe to trap her or not. And Jason has now seen that she IS one of the two Siamese cats that hangs out in the front of the junk-yard, so she’s bonded with Injured Cat (which at least means one less adult we need to trap). We keep going back and forth about whether to try to trap the kittens first, or the adults, and when to do it…we’re so new to this, and have no guidance other than a how-to video on when to feed and how to use the traps. Sigh. It feels very much like their lives are all in our hands and that’s not a comfortable feeling.

I woke up very late this morning, after several short, troubled nights of sleep, with the above song/video in my head. I first saw this video and heard the song back in 2006/2007-ish, and it has helped me to process grief many times over the years. So I’ll leave this here, in this post, which is a bit of an “in memorandum” post even though the person I’m mourning is only a distant acquaintance who nevertheless had a major impact on my life.

Sorry if this post is disorganized and chaotic. My brain is still not okay.