Mama Rose and Her Babies, part 2

Hi Efurrybody! It’s me, Cookie! First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to our furriends here in the U.S.! We hope that you all get as much turkey as you can eat! Just remember, no onions! Onions are toxic to us kittehs. So we won’t be able to eat the stuffing since it has onions in it. Mommy and Daddy are busy cooking, so I thought I would take this opportunity to fill you all in on the next part of the story of Mama Rose and Her Babies.

When we left off last time, Mommy and Daddy were headed next door, armed with humane traps and cat food. They wanted to start trying to trap bebbeh kittehs before they grew up and decided to be scared of people.

When Mom and Dad got next door, Penny and Bob showed Mom and Dad where they saw the kittehs go under the deck. So Mom and Dad put cat food on paper plates and put the plates of food into the traps. But this time, they set the traps to trigger the doors to close when the kittehs stepped on the thingy in the traps.

Mom and Dad went back home and waited nervously. Would the bebbeh kittehs go into the traps?

Just a few minutes later, Penny called Mom. Two kittehs were inside one trap! Mom and Dad raced next door, and found two adorable bebbeh kittehs, frantic to get out of the trap!

At the time, we had four fosters living in the kitten room – Kelly, Michelle, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Kanga. So the new (feral) kitties needed to stay in the room where The-Room-That-Moves sleeps. Mom and Dad call it “the garage”. Mommy had a large cat cage that the people in PAWS refer to as a “condo” that would be a safe place for the feral bebbehs to stay. The condo belongs to someone else in PAWS, but gets loaned out for situations like this.

Mommy and Daddy transferred the two kittehs to the condo and brought the trap next door again and put more cat food inside. As soon as Mommy and Daddy got back home, the phone rang again! Bob called to say that two more bebbeh kittehs had been trapped! So Mommy and Daddy went to get them, and transferred those two bebbehs to the cat condo in the garage.

Mommy and Daddy were very happy to have caught four of the bebbehs so easily! So they brought the trap back next door and set it again. They wanted to catch the rest of the bebbehs before dark. Because after dark, the possums, raccoons, and skunks (!) come out to play. Mommy and Daddy did not think that Penny and Bob would be very happy if a skunk got trapped in their back yard!

So Mom and Dad set the trap and went home again. When Bob and Penny called the next time, the news was not as good. The Mama had gotten caught! Oh noes! They really did not want to trap the Mama until much closer to the scheduled surgery date. Now what would happen?

So Mom called her contacts in PAWS. They said to keep the Mama rather than to release her, because she might never go into the trap again. More cages were needed because the one condo would be too small for everybody. The whole point of trapping the bebbehs was to work with them to try to tame them. There was NO WAY that Mama was going to let her bebbehs get handled if she was in the same cage. And there was NO WAY that Mommy or Daddy was going to put their hands into the cage with the Mama to try to reach for a kitten!

So Mommy and Daddy borrowed three more cage condo thingies to house the feral fambly. Luckily, the weather had not gotten too cold yet, so it was comfortable in the garage. At least it was safe from wind and rain.

The kittens were scared.

Mama was NOT PLEASED to have been trapped. Not happy at all. In fact, she tried to break out of the trap, and hurt herself on her lip and nose.

(Oh, and those are NOT ears growing out of Mama’s butt.  Those ears belong to one of the bebbeh kittehs in the next cage.)

But there were still more bebbeh kittehs out there! So after CAREFULLY transferring Mama to a cage, Mommy and Daddy set the trap out once more in Penny and Bob’s back yard. And waited.

By dark, the other bebbehs had not been trapped yet! Mommy and Daddy were worried. What happened to them? Were they hiding under the deck? Had they run away when their Mama got trapped?

Mom and Dad were very sad, but did not want to risk trapping another animal, like a skunk. So they left the traps in Penny and Bob’s yard, with food inside, but set so that the doors would not close.

More next time …