Cats Pulling Heartstrings
Happy ending!
Summer 2022, we retired to the panhandle of Florida. Bring on the rocking chairs! Feline companionship started coming up in our conversations. We both love cats, but how could two biologists want a bird killer as a pet? It seems sacrilegious, but such is love and desire.
When we lived in Arizona, we raised and tamed a litter of feral kittens whose mom gave birth under our house. We loved them all, but travelled too much, so we found good homes for all 6. In New Mexico, Hawaii, and Solomon Islands, cats came with our rentals: White Boy, Rocky, and Stevie, respectively. We adored them all, even though we didn’t choose them. Two crossed the rainbow bridge on our watch, one due to age, and one had cancer. When we left Guadalcanal to return to Arizona, South Pacific Stevie moved to a neighbor’s.
During the Covid pandemic, we decided to move from AZ to MT. We thought Bozeman might be home, near Yellowstone NP, lots of great mountains and wildlife. We started visiting a local shelter to look at kitties. We speed dated in the “pet and play” rooms, but chickened out. Then, we changed our minds about Montana. The winters were too cold, dark, and long. Florida beckoned and we found a little house on a lake, so bid farewell to our condo!
This April, we started snooping pets at a shelter in Tallahassee: spring cat fever. We discovered that unlike Montana, you don’t simply walk in, meet pets, pick one, pay, and go home with a new housemate. There’s an online application that must be up-to-date and linked to a specific pet. However, not all of the available kitties are on the website. Some are ghosted, living in foster homes, or waiting in vet clinics.
We kept visiting the shelter, and one day while being shown quite elderly cats, I blurted, “We would like an orange kitten!” Gasp! Honesty. (Were they showing us old kitties because we were so obviously old humans?)
A staff revealed new intel – a litter with two orange kittens was on display at at a local animal hospital. We could go meet them!
Love at first sight! Two ginger-buff brothers, Cilantro and Oregano, and their darling sisters, tiger-striped Paprika and calico-gray Pepper needed homes, but, whoa, they all had diarrhea. Before they could be adopted they had to be cured. Also, before adoption, the “boys and girls” had to be neutered and spayed. The vets were waiting for bubbly digestive tracts to mend in response to various treatments before doing the surgeries.
For 3 weeks we visited the kittens, taking them from the display case to a small room to play. The brothers were very interactive with each other, while the sisters seemed to prefer playing alone. The two boys also played with us more than the girls did. Cilantro and Oregano purred in our arms. They were both soft-clawed, jumping into our laps without the tiniest scratch. Soon we were 100% sure that we wanted to adopt the brothers.
By mid-May, the boys had been neutered. Oregano was well, but Cilantro still had leakage and soft stools. We wanted to adopt them together. We figured that once we got them home and settled, they would get better. The animal hospital was stressful for us, so we figured it was hard on the kittens, too. There were dogs barking, lots of people talking loudly and walking around, and the kittens plexiglass display case was amid the commotion.
The shelter and animal hospital agreed to let us adopt and finish treating Cilantro at home. Finally, on May 20th, we completed official paperwork at the shelter, and returned to the animal hospital to pick up our boys. At home the kittens quickly adjusted to everything, including a new litter box. We crossed our fingers, kept them on a special diet, continued antibiotics for Cilantro, and hoped for wellness.
Oregano and Cilantro, renamed Tigre and Prince, respectively, were a joy. We trained them to wear halters and walk on leashes. Tethered, they climbed their first trees. We took them in our canoe to explore the lake. Short-haired Tigre was the Admiral, while fluffy Prince, became First Mate. They learned to stay in the boat after each took accidental dips of shame.
The boys loved their cat carriers and were eager to go for rides in the car or be transported to the canoe. We were a big happy family. Both kittens napped in my office during the day, and would often check on what I was doing at my desk. At night they purred me off to dreamland, sharing my bed, Tigre laying across my neck and Prince atop my head. I was in purr-vana.
For a few weeks, the boys grew, especially fluffy Prince Cilantro (PC). PC was nearing 6 pounds by mid June, suggesting his adult weight would be about 12 pounds. He was going to be a big golden boy! He had features of a Maine Coon, with tufty fur in his ears, a thick ruff, and long fur sticking out from his toes. I imagined the two of them as the big golden cats who pulled the Norse goddess Freya’s chariot. They certainly pulled our parenting instincts out of a void. We were smitten.
Tigre, alias Mouse, or full name, Tigre Oregano Mouse (aka TOM), hovered at 5 pounds. We began to worry about him. He wasn’t growing very much.
For several weeks, the two kittens kept their duties in the litter box, but Cilantro never got well. Then they both had diarrhea, again. Despite extra fiber and regular doses of a probiotic goo called Propectalin, they were not getting better. One morning I woke up to a juicy pile next to my head. Cilantro had lost control on my pillow. And then, Oregano also had leakage accidents on my bed.
We soldiered on, but the kittens started having more “accidents” on furniture, on the floor, on rugs, and on us. We spent hours cleaning the house, washing things, and driving to the vet clinic and shelter for more testing and medications. Nothing was working. The shelter director kept them overnight. She concluded that something unusual and serious was going on with their digestive systems. She gave us a medication for Coccidia, as the vet clinic had not treated for that.
We came back home and did the coccidia treatment for a week, but no luck. Next, the vet clinic did PCR tests in search of an organismal explanation for the incessant diarrhea. The PCRs came back negative. We started to wonder if the intestinal issues were congenital, such that the kittens, now becoming cats, would need specialized care for life.
We couldn’t keep them inside our house any longer. We moved them to our screened porch, which worked ok for a few cool snap days, but then a heat dome returned; Florida in the summer. Things were getting dire. The kittens were suffering and we had to constantly bathe them and clean everything around them.
With my hip replacement scheduled for early August we worried that the house would be too contaminated for safe recovery. Infection is a serious concern. We had no good place for the kittens in the house and it was too hot on the porch. We didn’t want to confine them to a tiny bathroom. What could we do?
We had to do what was best for them. They were getting sicker, not better. TOM was a bag of bones, and Prince was no longer gaining weight, either.
Luckily, one of the veterinarians at the animal hospital told the shelter director that she was willing to adopt the kittens and focus on curing them. On our 21st anniversary, July 3, we drove to the animal hospital. The boys keenly got into their carriers. We arrived, looking forward to meeting the kind, adopting vet. We were told she was busy in surgery, but would call us later that evening.
We let them have our kittens. The vet never called us. That was the last time we saw Prince Cilantro and TOM.
I later recalled that a middle-aged woman, harshly said to one of the young front desk workers, “Just get the kittens!”
The drop off was emotionally crushing. Our babies were gone. We went to our car and sat together crying. Regret poured over us, but we knew we’d made the right choice for the kittens.
The next morning I called the animal hospital hoping to talk to the adopting vet, or arrange an appointment to meet her. We were told by a receptionist that the vet had no obligation to talk to us because we had “surrendered” the kittens. It felt like the most inhumane and unjust treatment imaginable at the time.
The harsh treatment at the clinic stung. As I was writing this, I decided to check the clinic website and saw that she was the adopting vet mentioned by the shelter director. She had been there. She could have talked with us! She wasn’t in surgery at all.
I tried to put myself in the vet’s shoes. I suppose she didn’t want to deal with any emotional fallout, debate about the future of the kittens, or us potentially begging to see them again. It wasn’t like we weren’t willing to pay for veterinarian services, but maybe that’s what she thought. It seemed to us best to let the kittens have long-term care by a professional, given her offer.
As wildlife biologists concerned with ethical treatment of all animals (including people), we had expected more compassion from a doctor, something like… I understand it is hard to give up pets you love, but hey, I am going to do all that I can to get them well and take care of them. You guys did your best.
In hindsight, we didn’t fully understand the implications of “surrender”, but ignorantia juris non excusat (ignorance of the law is no excuse). Fortunately, the director of the shelter told us what we needed to hear: you guys did the right thing and the vet will all she can for the kittens.
Waiting for Closure…
We asked the shelter director to keep tabs on how the kittens were doing. We waited and waited, worried and worried, and cried over them being gone from our lives. Remember this…remember that…pity parties over and over.
On August 6th, more than a month after giving up the kittens, I got an email from the shelter director:
With a combination of prescription diet, psyllium husk, visbiome, and metronidazole, they've achieved soft but firm stool. Hooray.
Leakage resolved! Double hooray! She's keeping them on a longer routine of the metro and then she's gonna see how they do off of it. They've got full run of her home now that the leaking has resolved. :)
Happy Ending! We wish them well and they will forever be in our hearts.
