Tag Archives: pets

Events

Six new kittens born this past week!

Mitzi and Trixie, our two sister kittens, are about a year old, as I mentioned last week. And they were also recently pregnant. I say “were”, because both of them gave birth to three beautiful kittens each, within the span of a few days, this past week. You can read the details below, or you can watch a video I’ve put together which includes footage of all six kittens, as well as Mitzi’s birth. If you’re not comfortable watching a live animal birth, then please don’t watch past the first segment of the video.

Given that cat pregnancies last about 65 days, I’m guessing they each met their prince charming sometime in early to mid-March. By looking at the kittens, we can tell Mitzi’s tomcat was striped, and Trixie’s tomcat was black. And we pretty much know who they are, since we saw two tomcats matching that description prowling around our garden these past few months.

Trixie’s tomcat resembled Felix, our own boy wonder. He was all black, except for white socks on his paws and a white-tipped tail. Mitzi’s tomcat was a fairly fierce striped tomcat, quite a large and strong fellow. I think Mitzi prefers striped cats, like her. She doesn’t like Felix very much, although he gets along great with Trixie.

Trixie gave birth first, last Sunday night, on May 16th — the night between Saturday and Sunday of last week. She hid in the cellar, where she found a nice, clean box and she managed quite nicely by herself. In the morning, she showed up for food, minus the big belly. We looked for the kittens but didn’t know where they were until she led me to them. What a relief when we found them! We took the box and Trixie and put them in a nice, quiet storage room next to our house, where she could nurse them in peace.

When we checked the kittens, we discovered she’d given birth to two tomcats who resembled their father, and a striped kitten whose color doesn’t match hers or Mitzi’s or her mother’s, so it’s possible that she may have mated with two tomcats — perhaps even Mitzi’s tomcat. Continue reading →

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Meet Trixie and Mitzi

I’ve said for some time that we have two kittens and a tomcat (actually, it’s three kittens and a tomcat now), but I’ve never really introduced them to you. So here are Mitzi and Trixie, our first kittens, as they were the night we brought them home, in late June, 2009.

They might look tame and playful here, but they were pretty much feral. They were born to a half-domesticated cat that had made its home in the barn of an old stove-maker in our town. The poor man got his arms and chest scratched pretty badly by the kittens and their mom when he pulled them out of the barn for us.

We’d seen the mother before she’d given birth, and she was adorable, so we begged him to give us two of the kittens when they were ready to be weaned. He was more than glad to do so — he didn’t want a colony of stray cats in his yard.

Here they are the second day, when we put them outside, in the sunlight. They would hiss at us whenever we got near, so it took a bit for us to gain their trust.

Trixie is the one on the left, and Mitzi is the one on the right. Mitzi is the one that looks like her mother, and the resemblance is even more striking now that she’s grown up and is also pregnant. I’ll show you those photos in a later post…

Here’s Trixie again.

Doesn’t she look like she’s laughing in this photo?

Continue reading →

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Black kitten fears hammer

So funny… this little black kitten fears a hammer head and keeps pawing it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1757803256836451754

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Today, our cats became CATS

Today, our cats became CATS. They’ve been catching mice all afternoon. Each of them caught at least 4 or 5 mice, after we broke up a mice colony in our garden (aka an old hay pile). Finally…

I kept watching them all summer, unsure of how to react to mice. I even brought them mice, which they ate, but I wasn’t sure they’d figure out they need to catch the little critters for themselves. Now I know they can be real cats. Thank goodness!

The best part of all — or as my wife would put it, the worst part of all — is they’ve been presenting their kills to us by leaving them on our front door. I think that’s awfully sweet of them. I’ve been praising them and kicking the mice away nonetheless. I hope they get the message.

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The little deaf tomcat

Updated 10/22/10: You can see better photos of Felix here.

In the summer of 2006, we visited family in Romania, and we met this wonderful white tomcat at my mother-in-law’s place in Tulcea, Romania. He was still a kitten, a growing boy, scruffy, dirty, and completely adorable. He was also deaf as a post, the poor thing.

Having been born pure white with blue eyes, that doomed him to a life of silence. He couldn’t hear a thing. Thankfully he’d feel the vibration of the ground as you approached him and turned around, but you couldn’t count on that, so you’d often have to touch him to get his attention and watch your step around him. The price for those eyes was heavy, sure, but get a load of those sparkling sapphires!

My wife and I fell in love with him immediately and thought seriously about adopting him, but there was an overseas trip to think about, and a visit to the US Embassy in Bucharest to arrange for his passage. Then he’d have had to live in an apartment, albeit a nice one, but still, he wouldn’t be outside, in nature. And we’d have had to hide him from the building administration, since pets were no longer allowed in our building. After a lot of consideration, we decided to leave him where he was, and hope for the best.

I still regret that decision. The next year, we found out he’d been run over by a car, right outside the yard. He climbed over the fence, and since he was deaf, didn’t hear it, and splat, his light was put out. At least it was quick, but it didn’t have to be that way. He’d still be alive today if we’d adopted him, condo rules and customs rules be damned. He’d be three years old now, a happy, content, white tomcat.

I also regret not taking better photos of him. The ones that I have are of barely adequate quality. The framing isn’t right, the lighting is poor, I’m not showing him from the best angles, etc. At least I have him on video in all his scruffy glory, playing with my camera strap and playing with a puppy whose photo you can see here.

You can watch the video below or on blip.tv and YouTube. You’ll notice the play between him and the pup gets pretty rough at times; don’t blame me for not stopping it. He could have run away, but he stood his ground and drove the puppy away in the end. That’s one brave little tomcat! Gosh, I miss the little white fluffball!

Although he couldn’t hear and respond to a name, I called him Felix, and this year, when we adopted a little black and white tomcat rejected by his mother, I named it Felix as well, to honor his memory.

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