The Night Kitty

I started this blog to blog about jewelry and creating, but haven't gotten around to that, although I did some on my jewelry website. I'm going to do a couple of blogs on creatures of the night (no, not vampires). Here is one that I've recycled from the jewelry site. There will be a new one next about some of those other creatures of the night (still not talking about vampires).

Here's Callie, also known as The Night Kitty. Despite the glare of her eyes in the flash Callie is a sweet cat who wants to be petted more than she wants to eat. She appears at sundown and runs away at dawn. She is terrified of the daylight world.

Callie showed up a year ago in March. She was about a year old then. She was so feral that I couldn't catch a glimpse of her at first. I would just hear her running away. My other outdoor cat eats on the front porch. They got to be friends and he let Callie eat his food. Gradually Callie let me get closer and closer and after about four months she let me stroke her while she was eating. She spent the cold winter nights in the heated doghouse on the front porch curled up with the other cat, Buddie. I worried that she would get pregnant before she was tame enough for me to handle, but she didn't. I worried too, that the coyotes would eat her, but so far they haven't.

I don't have to worry about pregnancy any more though. If you look closely at the picture you can see that the tip of Callie's right ear has been amputated. It's rounded off nicely and I didn't even notice it for a couple of weeks. I recently found out that it's what vets do when they spay feral cats. They "notch" the ear to let people know that cat has already been fixed.

Callie lets me pick her up for a few seconds now. She runs only about 10 feet away from my husband or son, but won't let them touch her. There are woods all around our house and Callie apparently spends her daylight hours in a section that encompasses several acres. I'm hoping she will eventually start staying at my house in the daytime.

Dawn comes and she tenses, looking all around, and flinching at every noise. In short order she is off and into the woods. Something bad happened to her in the daylight.

Scrappy Love or What I Want to Do With a Baseball Bat

Scrappy before surgery.

I actually wrote this on the 7th of July, but I was too angry to post it then. I'm still angry, but not as much so I'm posting it pretty much as I wrote it on the 7th. I'll post some better news about Scrappy later.

On Sunday, July 1st I found a small, emaciated black kitten on the shoulder of the interstate, miles from anywhere. He was trotting down the shoulder as if he knew where he was going. Although he was glad to see me, he wanted to keep running down the road. It was like he had been doing it so long he didn’t know how to stop. In retrospect, I think he was running from the pain.

He was painfully thin and very dehydrated. His bones stuck out everywhere and he felt like a skeleton in a sack. He had clearly been on the road for at least a week. There were abrasions on his legs and body and he had a distended stomach and foul odor from worms and diarrhea. And there was something wrong with his mouth. It looked like a sticker, stick, bone or something stuck in it.

My husband held the kitten in his lap and we gave it water in a bottle cap. I’ll never forget the way the kitten fell on that water. I was shocked but pleased to see that he could drink well, despite the injury to the mouth. I called my vet. She was out for the day but said she would call the office about the kitten.

The relief vet did not have good news. The thing stuck in Scrappy’s mouth was the end of his broken jawbone sticking out, and he had a hernia on the side of his abdomen, infections, plus the minor abrasions. She was not hopeful and suggested I should consider putting him to sleep. I couldn’t do that. The kitten just seemed to have so much will to live. I figured he had to be tough, or he wouldn’t have survived so long on the interstate. I knew the regular vet, Dr. Rife, is good at fixing cat's jaws. I decided to get a second opinion and Scrappy was started on antibiotics.

Scrappy had surgery on the 5th and on the 7th I took him home. He’s virus negative. Dr. Rife wired his little jawbone together. He’s still pretty pitiful looking but I’m sure he’ll be a handsome fellow one-day. He’s on antibiotics and has had the first dose of worm medicine. The hernia was fixed also. We have him in a large cage right now, to keep him from hurting himself and to keep our other cats from swatting him. He’s very social and purrs a lot. I’m hoping that when he’s healthy we’ll be able to find a good home for him. We already have five cats so we’re not really looking for another.

Now here’s the baseball bat part: Scrappy’s injuries are consistent with being thrown from a car. The relief vet told me that he was the fourth kitten she’s seen in two weeks that had apparently been thrown from a car. One kitten, brought to office about a week before Scrappy, was found on the same interstate, some miles from where I found Scrappy. The vet’s office believes this kitten and Scrappy are littermates. Fortunately the first kitten was not seriously injured and was found much sooner.

I had already suspected that Scrappy had been thrown from a car. When the vet told me the jaw was broken I spent the day in pretty much of a blind rage. I called the state police and three county sheriff’s offices to see if anyone had reported someone flinging kittens out of a car. No one had. Toward the end of the day I couldn’t stand it anymore and started reminding myself that one of the vet’s technicians had said "maybe the kitten crawled up in the car and fell out on the road". That’s possible. I don’t think all four of them did though.

My favorite fantasy daydream (during that week) has centered around spending a little while with the person(s) who did this and breaking their jaws and assorted other parts with a baseball bat, just enough that they can relate to Scrappy’s injuries. Not that it would do any good, or that I'd ever do it, but I still think about it.

So…. don’t forget to spay and neuter. And as for the person(s) who did this—what goes around comes around. I believe when you do bad things, bad comes back to you. And I’m hoping that for you, it comes soon.