Status / Details
Christmas 2016, Special Tails
Additional Info
- "Two Trash Can Kittens"
About Smokin Joe & Rockin Rosie
The Eleventh Save of Christmas
One very hot summer evening, a baseball fan at a minor league game happened to walk by a trash can and heard a very faint cry. He stopped to look, and what did he find? Two tiny kittens about ten days old, with their umbilical cords were still attached. Who would do such a thing?
Fortunately, the man happened to know one of our volunteers. He gave her a quick phone call, and the kittens were soon with a foster mom. At first they were in bad shape, too weak to suck from a bottle, so we gave them subcutaneous fluids and tube fed them for more than a week. What a relief it was when after about ten days, they were sucking on their own, and how jubilant we were when after two weeks they were obviously beginning to thrive.
When you see them in a shelter, many cats seem to have similar personalities–either clawing at bars of their cages, desperate for attention, or trying to hide from the lights and noise–but in rescue, where most of the cats reside in private homes, foster parents spend enough time with individual cats and kittens that distinctions in personality are easy to see, even at the start.
Smokin Joe quickly grew (as kittens do), in this case into a beautiful silver-shaded boy with a loving personality. Ecstasy for him was to crawl into somebody’s lap and stay there, purring to express his contentment. Eventually he was adopted by a longtime supporter and adopter of PPCR who lives in Canada.
Rosie was a girly girl and a social butterfly, always in on the action in the kitten room. She enjoyed frolicking with the other kittens, and anything that moved was her toy! She wiggled her way into her foster Mom’s heart and fit so well into the household that her foster mom adopted her. (This is what we call a “foster failure,” and they are pretty common in rescue.)
Cats and kittens find their way into our Purebreds Plus foster system in all different ways and circumstances. Our experienced fosters individually take different breeds, ages and disabilities including all sorts of medical problems and behavior situations. But the fact remains that most of the cats we take in don’t have special problems, other than that they were unwanted. We are blessed to be there for all of them.