THERE can NEVER be TOO MANY
CAT PHOTOS
Obviously one of the main reasons you are here is to see photos of my cats:
Katie, Abbie, Angie & Luke
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Group pictures:
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This is Katie
She likes boxes, ribbons and bows, paper & plastic bags--basically any sort of packaging material.
Katie found her way to us when she was less than 4 days old, cold and with her eyes still shut and umbilical chord attached. Her feral mom left her on the edge of the parking lot at my brother-in-law's store, along with her smaller sibling on a chilly October day. We had just tragically lost our beloved kitty a few weeks earlier, and I was not ready for another pet yet, let alone two that were so young. But we were their only chance. Katie weighed 6 ounces, and fit in the palm of your hand. Clyde only weighed 4 oz, and very sadly he only survived a couple of days. But Katie was strong and tenacious, and now she's a big healthy kitty who just turned seven.
After she was brought to our house my husband was immediately dispatched to Petco to get Kitten Milk Replacement (KMR) while I went online and learned as much as I could about caring for abandoned kittens. The most important thing was to keep them warm. We used a heated two-liter bottle beneath a towel in the increasingly larger boxes we kept her in, so she stayed nice and warm while she slept. I had to feed her from a tiny bottle every few hours for the first couple of weeks. We needed to add a drop or two of mineral oil to her KMR feedings and gently rub her belly to get her to poop, but it's vital to make sure what is going in something so small is also coming out. We also used damp cotton balls to clean her, like her mother would have groomed her. It all worked, and by the time she was three months old she was sleeping on the bed with us and running around the house, happy and healthy.
Katie does have the unfortunate habit of periodically relieving herself in places other than her litter box--specifically the corner of our home office (she simply thinks it's OK to go there). We've adopted various strategies to limit the damage, including the deployment 6 litter boxes in the basement and an upside-down plastic carpet runner along the wall of her favorite target area. It mostly works, mostly.
This matter aside, she is a very affectionate kitty with beautiful eyes and lovely thick charcoal-grey fur. She likes to be near us much of the time, and sometimes even helps me when I'm trying to work by lying across the papers on my desk, to keep them warm. She, like her housemate Luke, is an exclusively indoor kitty (you can read the story of why Katie is not allowed outside below). However, when it snows and there's at least a foot or so on the ground, we make an exception and let her explore a bit. She loves it.
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This is Abbie
She is a very special kitty that we fostered from when she was 2 weeks old, along with her sister Angie.
The following spring after we got Katie I volunteered at a local animal shelter to foster other abandoned kittens. Because of Katie I had experience with the bottle feeding and other tasks necessary to care for them at a very young age, and I knew that springtime is when shelters are overflowing with abandoned kittens. They called me within a few days. The first time they told me it would be 5 kittens, and I said OK but that I would not be able to pick them up until I got off of work. They called me back an hour later and said that someone else had agreed to foster them, but that there were three others and would I take them? I said yes again and went straight there after work.
There were 2 calicos and a smaller black one, all females about 2 weeks old. They had been found by a maintenance crew in the bushes at an office park that morning. The mother kitty did not come back, so the kittens were brought to the shelter mid-afternoon. I was there to pick them up by 5:30. They gave me medicine for the small one, who had respiratory problems, and a big can of powered KMR. We named the whiter calico Abbie, the one with more black fur Angie, and the little one Betty. Sadly, despite our best efforts Betty only survived a couple days, as with Katie's sibling Clyde. But Abbie and Angie thrived, and I quickly found it was easier to take care of the two of them than it was with Katie, but that was because she had been only 3-4 days old rather than two weeks. Abbie & Angie were not as frighteningly fragile.
We kept them in the tub, which worked great, and tried keep Katie out of the bathroom and away from them. But she wasn't having any of that, and insisted she be let in there whenever I was taking care of them. After just watching and staring at them intently a couple times, she decided to jump in the tub and immediately started grooming one while I watched. It was soon quite clear she was very fond of them and wanted to be near.
The plan was that the shelter was supposed to take them back when they were 6-8 weeks old, and then at some point I could foster another batch of kittens who needed round the clock care. But the shelter people decided that Abbie and Angie had already found their forever homes. They didn't come out and say this however, and just kept pushing back the date, saying we should keep them until their next round of shots...
She's a bit different from the other cats, and gets special privileges because of this. Specifically, she gets to go outside. Several years ago I began noticing that she would spend a considerable amount of time grooming herself, much more than her sisters. It got to the point where I realized she had actually licked a big bald spot on the inside of her leg. I did the obvious internet queries, which all suggested that her behavior was due to the fact she was stressed and bored, and that she needed some sort of outlet for this energy. Apparently, this is sometime more common in 1) female cats, 2) indoor cats, and 3) multiple cat homes. Abbie hit the trifecta. There was one quite uniform solution suggested--let her outside.
We had wanted to keep all the cats indoors, but it was amazing how quickly her personality changed once we started letting her outside.
She passes through the house regularly, getting me to let her in and a few minutes later let her back out, over and over. She is almost always really good about coming back inside as it gets dark, w
If we are out of the house the entire day we'll joke about where we might find Abbie when we get home because she has been known to get in places we'd not have thought possible. The ceiling tiles in the basement are a big fave, no matter how hard we try to block it. She can push her way up into the small space above the drop ceiling, and then head over to the unfinished part of the basement where the old furnace is. When I can't find her anywhere, I go check the furnace and she's almost always sitting there, waiting for me to open the door. I'm not sure if she can get back out from the drop ceiling the way she gets in. The short of it is she gets to go outside, and is a massively happier kitty because of it.
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This is Angie
She likes boxes too, and is very good at giving hugs.
A little about Angie...
She is very affectionate, and often likes to stand on her hind legs while reaching up with her front ones against me, so we can have a quick head butt and hug. None of our other kitties give hugs.
She gets very excited when she smells certain scents, like when my husband puts on a bit of colone after a shower. She waits on the bed for him to come over, and does a little roll in anticipation. She gets so excited about things sometimes that she just stands to tremble all over, such as when she's hungry and I'm opening up that little can of Fancy Feast.
Angie does go outside sometimes, but she usually ends up getting nervous and wants to go back inside after a a few minutes. Despite our attempts to discourage it, she does like to grab a quick bite of some grass while she's out, so that she can then come back in and throw it up a few minutes later.
Sometimes she'll get a bit ornery and pick on Luke a bit, but we try to quickly intervene and distract her. We are guardedly optimistic that as he gets older she'll be less aggressive towards him, but we'll always keep an eye on it. He's definitely much bigger than her, and could really put her in her place if he chose to.
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This is Luke
He ran out in front of our car at rush hour on a busy road when he was only two weeks old.
You can read his full story below.
He's a big, solid boy now, but was quite small when he joined us. We were conveniently already familiar with the KMR drill and had absolutely no problem feeding him from the start. I brought him to work with me for 5-6 weeks, until he got old enough to not like getting into the carrier for the long ride as much. But by then he was big enough to be left with the three older kitties.
Luke’s Story
Our kitty Luke (full name Lucky Luke) is now two and I want to share his story.
Luke’s tale is a pretty good one with a happy ending.
But some quick backstory first. We already had 3 cats, all rescued so young they required bottle feeding.
They came to us via a local animal shelter a few months after we got Katie. Only 7 months herself, she started grooming them and clearly wanted to be near. The plan was that Abbie and Angie would only be with us until they were old enough to go to forever homes, and then I could foster others needing that level of round-the-clock care. Well, without ever saying so directly, the shelter people decided Abbie and Angie had already found their forever homes. By the time they were 12 weeks old we knew we were a 3 cat household. The clincher was how much Katie loved them.
And now Luke’s story--fast forward to September 2013, two days after Labor Day. My husband Jim and I were driving to work around 8:30am, on Route 25 in Centereach, NY. It’s an especially busy stretch of a road which runs from NYC to the east end of Long Island. Two heavily traveled lanes each way and a central turning one, it was one of the most treacherous parts of our commute. We were stopped at a light, first car in the left lane and there was a big W.B. Mason office supplies truck behind us.
When the light turned green the car on our right sped away, and as we got going we saw something black tumbling across our lane. Our first thought was that it was a plastic bag, but then we both immediately screamed “IT’S A KITTEN!” The car in the right lane passed so close the force sent the tiny cat rolling into our lane.
To say that fortune favored Luke that morning is an epic understatement. I was the driver, and as Jim yelled “STOP!” I was frantically trying to decide if it was safe to do so. The stars were aligned—there wasn’t a car directly behind the one quickly pulling away in the right lane, and the truck behind us was well back. I slammed the brakes, threw on the flashers and waved my arms to the truck driver, who I knew right away saw what was happening. Jim was already out of the car and trying to grab the cat, who was now in the center turning lane. Thankfully the kitten was so disoriented by his tumble that he couldn’t run away into oncoming traffic. It felt like hours, but Jim was probably back in the car within ten seconds.
We were quickly again underway, with a big wave of thanks to the truck driver who served as the best protector we could have asked for. Then we both briefly burst into tears. The tiny kitten seemed fine other than being understandably frightened by the incident, and we spent the final 10 minutes of our drive contemplating what had just happened: busy, busy road, during the height of the morning rush hour, barely missed by one car, and then us coming along next, with the ability to safely stop. Us, of all people--cat people, with the experience to care for such a tiny creature. What were the odds?
The kitten was about two weeks old, just learning how to explore his surroundings and barely able to walk. We think he was born to a feral mom living behind a big storage facility. When we got to my husband’s workplace—the same mattress store with his brother-in-law where we'd found Katie, we got a blanket and a box for the kitten who we decided to name Lucky (for some strange reason). I ran straight out to the pet store for KMR and we started the bottle feeding drill again. He was a good eater straight away, and then happily settled into his little nest and slept much of the day.
This is where it needs to be pointed out that we were going away the following day. We’d planned a two-night trip to Vermont as a short end-of-the-summer vacation. And now we had a tiny kitten who needed feeding every couple hours. It didn’t take long to reach the logical conclusion that he was obviously coming with us. We’d arranged for a friend to feed Katie, Abbie and Angie while we were gone, but the little one would need much more care.
Thankfully Lucky, whose name we quickly shortened to Luke, was so small it wasn’t all that difficult. Two days after we found him we took him for a gondola ride up and a hike down the mountain at Killington ski area. He went with us to the Rutland farmer’s market, where he met lots of people who were delighted to hear about his exploits. And the nice owner of the pancake house was more than happy to let us bring in Luke. Walking around with a two week old kitten is a great conversation starter. During the drive home he peed on Jim twice, but we consider the trip a great success.
My husband knew he wanted to keep Luke from day one. But I tried really hard to convince someone we knew to adopt him, since we already had 3 cats and they got along really well. Luke was lovely, but I was afraid adding a male kitten would upset the household, and to a certain extent it has. His boundless energy levels can irritate the older ones, so we do play with the laser pointer a lot. Several friends were tempted to keep him, but we kept hearing things like ‘it was meant to be’ and ‘he chose you’.
Luke will never be allowed outside because he has no sense of danger and we figure he used up most of his nine lives that September morning. But he’s an affectionate, happy and healthy kitty, all black except for a few white chest hairs, who mostly gets along with his sisters, mostly. Now full grown and calming down just a bit, Luke is now 2. I picked August 20th to be his birthday since it’s right about then, and of course as everyone knows, it’s also Robert Plant’s and Al Roker’s birthday, so Luke is in very good company.
I know there are too many kittens that will never be as lucky as our Luke. Sometimes I wonder if he had siblings and what happened to them, and I can’t help but feel a little sad. But when I see Luke tear from one side of the house to the other, I can’t help but smile. Without even knowing, our little guy risked it all and was rewarded with what every kitty deserves—a safe home, a full belly and a family that loves him.
If after reading Luke’s story you feel inspired to make a donation to help other homeless kitties find nice forever homes, both of these charities are more than worthy of support:
Save-A-Pet Animal Rescue and Adoption Center
608 Route 112, Port Jefferson Station, NY 11776
(631)473-6333 website: saveapetli.net
They run ‘C.L.I.F.F.S’ Clinic—Creating Long Island’s Feral Feline Solution, and provided Katie and Luke with their shots and neutering.
The Little Shelter
33 Warner Rd., Huntington NY 11743
(631)368-8770 website: littleshelter.com
They have been rescuing abandoned dogs and cats since 1927, and it’s where we adopted Abbie and Angie.
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Katie's Tree Story
Katie is an exclusively indoor kitty. Her outside privileges were permanently revoked a while back. after I found her 60 feet up a locust tree in our yard. She would have been higher if the tree was taller. We didn't let her out very often and tried to supervise her when she was, partially to protect the other creatures in the yard and in part to discourage tree climbing. She had gone high up in a tree when she was only 4-5 months so we'd stopped letting her out, until we had the big not-using-the-litter-box problem. We hoped letting her go outside a bit would help curb the problem, and for a few months things went pretty well and it seemed to work.
But...then...on the day after Thanksgiving (aka, Black Friday) a two years ago, I was out with her in the yard. As I had on previous occasions, I went into the house for a minute. When I came back out I couldn't find her anywhere. I spent the next 45 minutes hunting for her--she'd always stayed right in the back yard, so I was becoming worried. Then I heard a tiny yelp. Katie is a quiet kitty and almost never makes any noise other than purring. Even then it still took me a few minutes to find her because I was simply not looking high enough. And then I saw her, so high up the tree that the branch she was precariously perched on could barely hold her. I wasn't sure if I was going to throw up or have a heart attack. We'd lost a wonderful cat named Kyle this very way a few years prior, and it was the primary reason she was not let out before we started having the litter box issue.
After trying to coax her down for a few minutes with no success, I called my husband at work so he knew what was happening. I needed a bit of moral support if nothing else. I then spent the next hour and a half jumping up and down while calling her, trying to encourage her to come to me. She was very much in distress, but couldn't figure out how to come down back-end first. I did everything I could from the ground, including pulling out the extension ladder despite knowing fully well it wasn't anywhere near long enough. Normally it's not something I could/would have done by myself, but at that moment it was surprisingly light (I did have a few bruises the next day). But I couldn't lean it against the tree and go up without assistance, not to mention doing so alone would have been a bad idea.
Thankfully, in the meanwhile, my husband had called a friend to see if he get someone to come over and help me. His friend did, and be the time he got there Katie had worked herself down perhaps 10 feet, and was at least clinging to a slightly stronger branch. After a bit of discussion we decided to put the ladder up as high as possible, and then I would go up as high as I could. Once we started putting the ladder in place Katie grew more confident and came down a little further. I was able to get about 20 feet high, and once I was in place she quickly made it the rest of the way down to me. Within a few minutes she was clinging to my shoulders, too afraid to let me hold her, but safe. So I carefully climbed back down and brought her back inside. (Big thanks to Cliff for his help!)
And this is why Katie's is an indoor kitty. I don't think she minds all that much, and we do make an exception where there's a lot of snow on the ground.
