When I didn’t see Kale this morning, I feared the worst. She was looking really sick, yesterday. So was Zipper, and and I was on the lookout for him, too, while doing the morning feeding. I did eventually spot him inside the cat house, in the kittens favourite cat bed for cuddling. His eyes were stuck shut and he wasn’t coming out to eat. He did actually look a bit better, though, which gave me some hope.
All day today, I was on the lookout for Kale, including looking through the cat house windows, every chance I got. I only saw other kittens. It wasn’t until I was doing the evening cat feeding and all the kittens were out and about that I finally spotted her.
She was on the bottom of the cat bed. I hadn’t seen her before because the other kittens were blocking my view. It was quite obvious she was no longer with us.
After the cat feeding was done, my daughter helped me wash some eyes. Zipper still looks a hot mess, but does seem to be improving. Li’l Rig is one that looks all right until we start washing his eyes and goo starts coming out. We washed Wormy’s eyes, too, though she is almost completely recovered, as have the other kittens that went through their sick phase. That includes Kale’s brother, Sir Robin.
The eye washing done, my daughter helped me lift the roof of the cat house so I could retrieve little Kale. I had a hard time figuring out where to bury her. We buried so many kittens last year, all the spots I could think of already had kittens buried in them. Then I remembered that we still have walnut seeds that need to be planted. We keep forgetting about them.
Sweet little Kale is now laid to rest and, hopefully, will have a tree growing in her memory.
I know we have too many yard cats, and it’s so hard to get them spayed and neutered – a socialized kitten would have been easy to get done! It’s still really sad when we lose any. It’s one thing for them to just disappear, as the adults do, pretty regularly. We never know what has happened to them. It’s entirely possible, if unlikely, that someone found them and took them and kept them. This is the second kitten we’ve lost this year, and the other one looked like a still birth, so even that was very different. It was so special to have a feral cat like Brussel trust us enough to have her kittens in the sun room, where we could keep watch over them and socialize them right from the start. There was even someone interested in adopting Kale, though I think that was another person that backed out, since I’ve heard nothing since.
*sigh*
Rest well, little one.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 