Tony and Rocky have been getting out a bit more lately. One day last week, we found them climbing in the oak trees in front of the house.
It scared Vickie a bit… they got twenty feet and more up, and their inexperience shows… they were on little twigs as small as a pencil…. I wandered under the trees ready to catch them if they fell. We had a pretty good time. It made me laugh, because just three months ago, when we got them, we were concerned when they crawled out of their little box we kept them in. We were worried they might fall six inches… but they were little itty bittie things then. Now they are starting to toughen up a bit.
It’s a bit sad in a sense having animals…. we can’t take them to the vet like we’d like…. our animals will get torn up by some wild critter, and there’s not much we can do other than to doctor them ourselves the best we can. I try to assuage my guilt by rationalising that these are all animals that wandered in from feral parents, or were found orphaned somewhere and we rescued them… if we had not taken them in, they’d have died long ago. One thing I’ve noticed about our animals… they are all really tough and durable survivor-type creatures. If they were not, they’d have never made it as far as to our door.
Often I will watch our critters doing their thing in the wilds…. and I have to say, they really do have a good life. They have plenty of little things to stalk, deer and foxes and other animals to watch (and be aware of). Our animals for sure do not live in gilded cages.
Here’s some photos of these little kittens in the tree.
When I was a child,
I talked like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man,
I put childish ways behind me.
Chica was a rescued little puppy when we got her almost two years ago. No information on her past was available… she was tiny, emaciated, nearly starving and full of worms. But she had more energy and life from the beginning than I have ever seen in my life.
Perhaps due to early separation from her mother, she had a tendency to want to suckle on anything she found…. blanket corners, towels etc.
Then we came by two little dehydrated kitties who’s mother had been killed. We had to work hard to save them… they had to be bottle fed for a week or two, then we switched them to lapping milk replacer, and then slowly to finely ground wet cat food.
Chica the orphaned Chihuahua took pity upon the poor little kitties, she would often nestle carefully with them in their little box…. she’d gather them to her and treat them as if they were her puppies. Now they are very close…. and the kittens are approaching her size. Within the next few months they will greatly outclass her in size and jumping ability.
A surprising side-effect…. Chica is no longer suckling on anything she sees….. she has advanced to the next stage of life thanks to the little orphaned kitties. And she has taken the trauma she went through at losing her mother too young, and given herself as a replacement mother…. hopefully the good she is doing will help the two kitties grow up with little trauma at having lost their mother so young.
Here’s a little video showing how close Chica and Tony are
Matthew 23:37
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
who kills the prophets and stones to death those who have been sent to her!
How often I wanted to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,
but you were unwilling!
Here’s some photos of the kittens…
these were taken about two days after we got them….
at this point they were starting to eat the milk replacer….
and now they started getting more active, less lethargic….
The one with the colors on his face was almost unresponsive initially….
the first day or so, he would not fully wake up when handled…
his eyes were shine-less and sunk deep into his dehydrated head….
but a day of forcing him to swallow the milk replacer every four hours or so,
and he started waking up more… moving a bit…
although he could not lift his belly off the floor….
his legs would be all splayed out all over… really cute.
We rescued two kittens whose mother disappeared. These kittens are from a semi-feral female who disappeared. We think they were a week or two old when we got them. They were severely dehydrated and malnourished.. just tiny little balls of skinny fur, and almost unable to move. We have to force feed them kitten milk replacer from bottles…. one took to it within a half day, and grew quickly…. the other one barely took any… but lived, although for the first few days he seemed dead every time we checked in on them.
Now, four days later they are growing quickly, and the reluctant eater has started to suckle the bottle, and is now walking about.. they both seem healthy.
The odd thing is the reaction we got from our rescued female Chihuahua Chica. She turns out to be ‘broody’,and is taking care of the two orphans as though they were her own. So with Chica taking care of the personal cleanliness of the kittens, and us feeding them, we expect they will live. We’re going to give them to our neighbors who don’t have cats and need some for rodent control. It’ll be interesting to see how Chica takes to the parting.
I got some really good photos…. in a week or two I’ll take the best ten pictures I’ve gotten to that time, and put them into a screensaver… similar to the other screensavers we offer from our screensaver page.
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UPDATE: THE NEXT YEAR IN MARCH
Ten months after we got them…
We never could give these two guys away…
we raised them by the bottle and got too attached to them to let anyone else take them
Our neighbors were understanding
