I’m happy to report that I brought in a bountiful harvest this kitten season. The cat distribution system brought me not just one, but two weird little guys to call my own.
Kitten season refers to the time of year when cats have their kittens, when it’s warm enough outside for them to survive. Because of Southern California’s idyllic weather, the region has a particularly long kitten season, extending from spring through autumn. Each year across the nation, around 180 million new kittens are born, according to a 2022 article published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science. And they always far outnumber the amount of loving home available for them.
Last September, I saw a post on the Long Beach Animal Care Services Instagram page urging people to volunteer to foster bottle kittens (newborn kittens that need to be bottle fed). I had lost one of my beloved cats to cancer the prior year, and I felt I was ready to open up my home and heart to a new kitten.
I filled out an online application for a bottle kitten, and indicated that I was interested in fostering-to-adopt. Months passed and I nearly forgot about my application, but in May I got a sudden call asking if I could pick up a bottle kitten that same day.
Prepare yourself for sad news dear reader: I never got to meet that kitten, or the next kitten they called me about. They didn’t make it. The first kitten came down with “fading kitten syndrome” and began suddenly and rapidly declining in health, and the shelter’s foster coordinator told me to hold off on picking him up. The next kitten that they contacted me about apparently seemed fine at first, but again I was told not to come to the shelter at the last minute. The second kitten apparently had fatal neurological damage that went unnoticed when he was first brought in.
But less than a week after that first call, I was sent a photo of the tiniest tuxedo kitten I’d ever laid eyes upon, along with a text asking if I could pick him up from the shelter the next day. I crossed my fingers and hoped that the powers that be would keep him in the land of the living ‘til I could get to him.
I’m happy to report my hopes weren’t in vain. Upon arriving at the shelter, I was escorted into a small, warm, windowless room where one wall was lined with kitten incubators and filled with miniscule orphans in glass cases. While the other neonatal kittens had littermates, my tuxedo boy was alone inside of his incubator. He had been turned in alone.
Despite his previously bleak circumstances, my little guy was a fighter. He crawled around his incubator on wobbly legs, mewling louder than all the other kittens combined.
The lovely and hardworking foster coordinator at the shelter guided me through the fundamentals of bottle kitten care. She taught me how to prepare the kitten’s formula and bottle, how to feed him, keep him warm and help him go to the bathroom — one of many skills he hadn’t yet learned.
The shelter sent the kitten and I home with two containers of powdered kitten formula, a kitten-sized bottle, a blanket, a carrier and an electric heating pad.
But soon after bringing him home we hit a bump in the road — he wasn’t pooping no matter how much I tried to help him, which is something new kittens should do every 24 hours.
Anyone who’s ever tried to look up a minor health concern online only for WebMD to nearly have you convinced that you are now at death’s door will understand how my stress increased after researching constipation in kittens. I was nearly certain my tiny new friend was going to literally die from constipation. After the longest 36 hours of my life, which included two warm baths and numerous belly rubs to get things moving, he finally took a dump in my bathroom sink. I could have wept with joy.
After that he started pooping on a normal schedule, which was a huge weight off my shoulders. But he still needed round-the-clock-care. Neonatal kittens need to eat around every three hours, including overnight. They also aren’t yet able to regulate their body temperature and have to constantly be kept warm. The electric heat pad the shelter gave me automatically turned off every three hours as well.
I was able to make a little apartment for him under the desk next to my bed, and plugged in his heat pad and an electric kettle on top to warm his formula in the nearby electric outlet. I added a waste paper basket, gloves, paper towels and hand sanitizer, so I had everything to take care of him in one corner that I could reach from bed. This went on for about two weeks. When he turned a month old, he didn’t need the bottle as constantly anymore as he started to show an interest in wet food.
Double the trouble
At the end of May, a friend told me that a family she knew had found a litter of kittens in their yard, and had already found homes for all but one of them. My friend said they were going to take the last kitten left to the shelter if no one wanted him.
I had not been planning on getting another kitten, but I remembered how crowded the shelter was and how overworked the dedicated staff were. I told my friend I could take him if no other adoptive families presented themselves.
But those absolute idiots inexplicably dropped him off at the shelter instead. Luckily, the universe intervened on his behalf, and he ended up being dumped at the shelter on the exact same day I had to bring in my first kitten — now and forever-more known as Tuna — for scheduled vaccinations. I was able to arrange to take him home with me as another foster kitten.
When they brought me into the kitten room, separate from the incubator-filled room for the newborns, I could have cried. I don’t want anyone to think the situation is the fault of shelter workers, because it absolutely is not. They are trying their utmost to tend to the rising flood of unwanted kittens that are born each year in our city.
But Jesus Christ, it was like walking into a kitten prison. An entire wall lined with little barred jail cells, the adorable inmates inside screaming for attention and freedom, fully aware that they had committed no crimes to justify their current circumstances. I’ll hear them crying at night when I can’t sleep for years to come.
Unlike Tuna, I planned to temporarily foster this new kitten. Then the foster coordinator told me that he’d have to be brought back to his cell once he was old enough to be neutered so that potential adopters would be able to meet him. There was no way I was sending him back there.
Since Tuna had been turned in alone, been kept in an incubator alone, and was adopted as a singleton, I do believe he may have been under the impression that he was the only kitten in the world. So meeting his new brother, Rufus, came as a great shock to him.
Rufus, very recently robbed of his siblings, immediately wanted to start playing, and Tuna took that personally. While Rufus was a whole month younger and significantly smaller, Tuna spent their first day together running away from his new bestie at full speed and hissing at him as loudly as he could. But he got over himself in under 24 hours, and the two became inseparable. They’re currently napping on my bed together as I type this.
Tuna’s adoption has already been finalized, and Rufus has his final rabies vaccine appointment at the shelter on Friday, after which he’ll be all mine forever.
But their many adorable, crying peers are still down at the shelter, dear reader. Please, if you are able and have a love for pets, I’m pleading with you to go down to the shelter and spring one of those tiny inmates, bring them home and give them a life worth living. They need you, right now.
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