When I was transplanting my prized Mexican Fence post giant cactus that fell over in a gust of wind yesterday afternoon in my front yard, I kept hearing a VERY LOUD yelping.....YELP
YELP
YELP!
My neighbors 2 doors down who were drinking beer on their porch with their chihuahuas and pit bull heard it too.. but their dogs did not go over to investigate, and their lawn chairs too comfy to walk over and look perhaps...
So today, while looking at cacti destruction and photographing for blog posting, I heard it again.. clarion.. YELP YELP YELP!!
Walking over to the abandoned home whose yard is full of weeds, I found this one live, and one dead kitten, immediately adjacent to the driveway. The one live one was panting. Small enough to fit in a small sized coffee cup, they have not been weaned yet - and the two old septuagenarian and octogenarian felines chez moi would eat them alive... so bringing them into my home is out of the question. Nature will have to take its course, unless anyone you know in Phoenix wants to adopt an unweened abandoned kitten?
I guess this means a) the feral cat population is low enough that stray males are not eating these abandoned kittens and b) the stray dog population is low enough that none have come over and had a kitten snack yet. As this house is across the street from my mailbox, once decomp sets in, something will need to be done. In the coming heat of summer, they'll be ripe for about 2 week.
...and this is not a scared little Facebook kitten, with it's flipper caught in a lobster trap, whose fields need watering. It's a real one.
Update - both kittens are alive. On my way to get the mail this evening, they were both walking around the abandoned home's driveway. I called AZ Humane Society, and they said I have 3 options
ReplyDelete1) leave them to yelp (which they've been doing since last Friday, per my neighbor)
2) move them, by hand, to put "my smell on them" and then the mother will move them
or
3) bring them in to the Humane Society for euthanasia.
I took a old broken broom handle with me, and tried to move the feral kittens, who were fully arms with sharp claws, and who each aggressively attacked the end of the stick as I tried to slowly, gently, move them back towards the weeds one by one. Move them by hand, and get bitten & scratched? No way.
I cannot hear them from inside the house, so I will leave them be. The muscular bob tailed orange male ring leader is definitely the father of at least one of the kittens. Grrrrrrrr.
Post Script - the 2 kittens that lived (I buried the albino kitten who died) were taken by a neighbor two doors down, and given to a co-worker who had 2 little twin girls at home who wanted kittens. They found a good home.
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