Kitten Rescue Life

Yesterday I drove Rump Roast 3 hours north to his dental appointment and we received some unexpected bad news. His pre-op bloodwork showed severely elevated kidney levels and anemia. He’s currently in stage four kidney disease. Instead of having his surgery he’s now been hospitalized.

This has come as a complete shock since he’s been acting normal at home. As many of you know, back in February I lost two of my cats on the same day. Since then our hearts and home have felt extremely hollow. So a month later when Rump needed a place to go, I was more than happy to step up as his foster, and I’m so glad that I did. Rump does things that remind me of all three of my babies that I’ve lost. He lays on my ribs, right where Coconut used to lay. He nibbles my arm like Romeo and he bites my blanket while he kneads like Leeroy did. I’ve enjoyed every moment that he’s been here. So much so, that we’ve been teasing the idea of keeping him since the moment we got him. I was planning on making it official after we got his stomatitis under control. I feel very blindsided by this and I’m hoping that our time together will not also be cut short. It would feel like such a cruel twist of fate to lose him too.

Donation links: https://linktr.ee/kittenrescuelife

I’m assuming at minimum he will likely need prescription food for the rest of his life. I’d love to raise at least a few hundred dollars that we can put toward food, transportation, and future care.

Please keep him in your thoughts. We’ll post more updates once we have some. For now we’re taking it a day at a time, waiting for test results to come back and an internist to confirm where we go from here.

One week ago we received an urgent plea for three kittens at risk in a high-kill shelter, who could be euthanized without notice at any moment due to their medical condition. There were six kittens in the litter, but three of them were exhibiting signs of limping calici, so those with symptoms were the most at risk. The shelter was willing to split them up to get the most urgent kittens to safety.

Splitting up litters is just not how we roll. One of our fosters said she’d take all six, so I rang the shelter to set things into place. Imagine my surprise when they said there was actually SEVEN kittens PLUS their feral mom. Mom and the bonus kitten were in a separate kennel, likely due to space, and mom was listed for euthanasia due to behavior.

We are a neonate focused rescue. We specialize in neonatal care and complex medical cases. We easily intake a dozen kittens for every adult we can help, and feral cats are not an area we have a ton of experience in. With that said, leaving mom behind to die alone in the shelter while we take all her babies was just not an option for us. I couldn’t live with myself or be proud of the work we do if we operated like that.

So, that’s the story of how we ended up with a mama and seven of her babies. Mom is definitely feral and will need a barn home once she’s completely vetted. Luckily we have a vet who can safely anesthetize ferals and some help lined up for placing her in a barn home as well.

We are very thankful to our fosters, Cynthia and Christine, for stepping up to help us save this family. It was a team effort and required a transporter, two willing fosters, and some help from our rescue community to pull this off. It takes a village and we are lucky to have ours.

Mama’s shelter name was Nina. Her babies are Tina, Tiff, Tracie, Treble, Tanya, Troy & Trenton. We are still exploring names. Drop your suggestions below 👇