Mama Rose and Her Babies, part 1

Hi Efurryone! It’s me, Cookie! As regular readers know, my sister Caramel and I were Mommy and Daddy’s first two fosters ever! And then we became Mommy and Daddy’s first two failed fosters ever!

The “problem” with failed fosters is that sometimes foster homes decide not to foster again, because of the risk of “failing” again. After Mommy and Daddy adopted Caramel and me, the nice people in the animal rescue group (PAWS) asked Mommy if she would be willing to foster again. They asked Mommy if she would foster “just one” kitten.

Mommy said no.

She said it would be too dangerous to foster “just one” kitten. So she asked for a lot of kittens – and that is when Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Joann became fosters. All four babies got adopted into terrific furrever homes!

Since then, we have fostered lots more kittehs – Daisy, Bo, Luke, Niecy, Trish, Antoinette, Beyonce, Kelly, Michelle, Winnie-the-Pooh, Kanga, Hidey, Mr. Bibs, and Dakota. We will tell you stories about them some other time. This time, I will tell you about Mama Rose, and Her Babies. There is so much to tell that I will break the story up into several posts.

This past July, we began seeing Mama Rose in our yard – a calico kitten about 9 or 10 months old. She was usually carrying a mousie in her teeths! Then one day in August, we saw two bebbeh kittehs with her! And then another time, we saw Mama Rose with six or seven bebbehs! So Mommy got busy on the phone, borrowed humane traps, and started feeding Mama and babies in the traps. Dad made sure the traps would not close by using a hanger wire to keep the trap doors open. This was so the kittehs would get comfortable going in and out of the traps.

Mom asked our nice next-door neighbors Penny and Bob not to feed the Mama or the babies, even though they really wanted to! The reason they did this was to ensure that Mama and babies kept visiting us and eating from the traps.

In the meantime, Mom contacted people in PAWS about appointments for Mama to get her ladygardenectomy, and for the babies to have their ladygardenectomies or hoohaectomies. So the original plan was to keep feeding Mama and babies until the day before their scheduled surgeries.

However, the scheduled appointments were still about three weeks away. Mom and Dad were concerned that the older the kittens got without human contact, the harder it would be to tame them. They had learned from fostering Hidey and Mr. Bibs that by three months of age, feral kittens are REALLY hard to “flip” and may not ever decide to trust humans.

It was really hard to guess how old the kittens were since Mommy and Daddy could not get close to them. So, on Saturday, September 18th, when our nice next-door neighbor Penny called Mom to tell her that the kittens were hanging out on the deck in their back yard, Mom knew what she had to do.

She and Daddy brought the two traps and some cat food next door, in hopes of trapping as many babies as they could.

To be continued …