It was like a bad case of déjà vu! A friend told me that a stray cat (one we knew to be barely a year old herself) had had four gorgeous little black and white kittens under a bush in her garden. They were adorable, but we knew we had to get rid of them as soon as possible, because it was only a matter of time until the dog discovered them and would be in danger of getting attacked by the protective mother cat. (The dog already got a scratched cornea this time last year - probably from a feral cat on the property.)
They say that the best way to get rid of unwanted kittens is to put them in a pillowcase and submerge it for a few seconds in the swimming pool. It's quick and painless, they say.... but we decided that none of us had what it took to do this dirty deed, and so we needed to devise a different plan for relocation of our little squatter family.
We placed a cat carrier in the garden, and every day for a week we put a little cat food in it. The mother cat got used to going into the container to eat the food, and soon she would go in even if she could hear our voices nearby. The kittens opened their eyes last week and began to crawl around a little, so we realised that time was running out. On Saturday, in a subterfuge that reminded my friend of a James Bond movie, we closed the door of the cat carrier, trapping the mother inside. Then we put the babies in a cardboard box lined with newspaper and set off in the car to find a new home for all of them.
We drove into the countryside, looking for a suitable spot: where the babies would be safe from predators, where the mother could hunt rodents in the fields, and where there were rubbish bins so that she could also scavenge as she was used to. Soon we found what seemed like a perfect spot, where we could place the kittens in a little cave-like shelter under a bridge. There was a refuse collection point nearby, and several empty bowls were lying around, where local residents had apparently been putting food out for the feral cat population.
We placed the kittens safely in the shade, together with a bowl of food for the mother cat, and then we positioned the cat carrier, ready to release the mum. We expected that she would be anxious to get back to her babies as soon as possible. What we hadn't foreseen, however, was that the self-preservation instinct would be even stronger than the mothering instinct for this little one. When we opened the door of the carrier, she took off like a bullet from a gun - getting herself far away from the threat of potential captivity. We were unsure what to do at first, but decided that she would be more likely to come back quickly if we got out of the way. So we left the little ones, and drove home again. Mission accomplished.... or so we hoped.
Three or four hours later, curiosity got the better of me. I remembered reading on the internet (last year, when Tamba's kittens were born) that the mother cat won't leave her little ones for much more than half an hour, because if kittens this tiny don't drink every hour or so, they begin to dehydrate and can't survive. So I knew the mother cat must have returned to them and been with them for several hours by now. I wondered whether she'd kept them there under the bridge or whether she'd moved them one by one to a different location. So I decided to drive back and, for curiosity's sake, just take a look.
To my horror, when I got to the bridge, I discovered that the kittens were still lying there in the box, the bowl of food was untouched, and there was no sign that the mother cat had ever come back at all. One kitten was crawling around and the other three were lying very still, sleeping. As if to mock me, the headline on the newspaper lining the box proclaimed, "Mistakes that can prove fatal." I realised that if we had been the cause of this young mother abandoning her precious little ones, our leaving the kittens there alone to starve slowly was much worse than the originally suggested fate of drowning them in the pool.
I couldn't do it.... I couldn't just leave them there, so, finally, I put the box back into my car and drove two miles down the road to an animal sanctuary that takes in abandoned animals and has a vet in attendance. Of course it was now Saturday evening and the centre was closed, but two young men were still standing by the gate, getting ready to mount their motorbikes. I pulled up next to the gate, and asked them if they knew what I could do with the kittens that I'd found under the bridge.
"It's closed here until Monday," said one of the guys, peering in at the kittens. "But these are very young. They'll need to be bottle fed."
Suddenly the other guy spoke, a young man in his late twenties, who introduced himself as Oscar. "I'll take them," he said. "My Dad still has feeding bottles from the last litter he raised.... and he's been talking about getting a couple of new cats for the farm. He'll probably keep two of them himself and try to find homes for the other two."
To my great relief, I was able to hand the box of kittens over to Oscar, knowing that someone would take care of them and actually give them a chance of good homes. Perhaps that was even better than being raised to become feral cats like their mother... who, sadly, will probably be pregnant again within a few weeks and probably will never be tameable.
For those of you who are beginning to think that I spend my time here in Spain rescuing abandoned animals (I promise you, I care much more about seeing people saved than seeing animals saved!!), let me reassure you that I am not by motivation a "rescuer." This morning, for example, I passed up on the opportunity to rescue a border collie puppy... even though having a border collie has always been high on my list of things that make life fun!
Yes, it's kind of strange, but true: I was walking to the library (where I work on the internet in the mornings) and coming towards me was a lady carrying a puppy. "Oh cute," I said. "It must only be six or seven weeks old. I used to have a dog like that."
"You can have this one," she replied. "It's seven weeks, it's the last in the litter, and we're trying to find a home for it. Wouldn't you like it?"
"I'd love it," I said, "but I'm afraid I can't. I hope you find a good home for it."
And off I went to the library... to continue with my real work, and not the adventures or misadventures of animal rescue missions!!!
Today is the big move. Dozens of boxes have been packed over the past weeks, and by this morning even the furniture was all lined up, waiting to be loaded into the vans. The two vans have been driving back and forward all day.
About ten days ago (
If you come to my house, you'll see that everyone seems to be growing up: Tobi, who used to be tiny, is now the same size as Tamba. But the biggest changes over the past year have been in Gabriela and Teddi, as you can see here. The two of them continue to be big buddies, and she's enjoying the fact that he hasn't moved to Scotland yet.