Who Says Males Aren’t Maternal?
Here’s a cute TNR (Trap-Neuter-Release) story from September 16, 2009 written by Andrea, a Kitten Rescue volunteer, with a sweet ending:
An animal-loving adopter of mine, Elaine, and her family were recently awakened at 4 a.m. by the sound of kitten mews in their driveway. They all ran outside to discover three kittens that appeared to be hungry and alone. Elaine put out food and the next day, discovered that the three kittens AND their mom had all moved into the garage! Elaine emailed me for help and I obliged at 6:15 this morning when I arrived at her house with a car full of traps and many cans of tuna. Elaine was nervous that we wouldn’t get the mom cat as she had visions of litter after litter being born in the garage. Luckily she was hungry, couldn’t resist the tuna, and walked straight into a trap.
The kittens are only about 7 weeks old, so Elaine decided ahead of time to try her hand at taming them and hopefully becoming a Community Foster with Kitten Rescue. So, her bathroom was ready to receive them as we trapped them. We got two in traps: a male and a female. We applied Advantage flea treatment and put them in the bathroom where they huddled in the corner trying to figure out how their world had just been turned on its head.
We continued attempting to trap the third kitten. After a while, Elaine realized that the two kittens in the bathroom were crying and the third kitten in the garage was answering them and trying desperately to figure out how to join them. Elaine found that remaining kitten right up against her laundry chute that separates the bathroom from the garage.
So, we stashed the two kittens in the shower where they continued to cry and we opened the laundry chute door, put an ice chest on the floor with a plate of tuna on it. Eventually, that third kitten got the courage to climb into the chute. After exploring her options, including climbing into the garage rafters (‘nope, my litter mates are not up there’) and shimmying up a rain coat that was hanging in the garage (‘not there either’), the kitten finally took a leap of faith and jumped into the bathroom — our trapping work was done!
Mom is now cooling her heels in my back porch (with food and water in her trap until midnight) awaiting her appointment at FixNation tomorrow — I will assess her to make sure she is feral before releasing her back to Elaine’s backyard and garage (so far her growls and hisses say she is). Hopefully, Elaine will be able to tame and place the kittens into safe and loving homes. If any of them are not tamable, they will be spayed/neutered and released with mom where they will be fed by Elaine and her kind hearted family for the rest of their days.
Post Script from September 18, 2009: When I walked into my back porch the next morning to load the mom cat into the car to take to FixNation, I was bowled over by the unmistakable smell of male cat urine. I quickly emailed Elaine to ask if she was sure the cat was the mom and if she had ever seen the kittens nursing or if there could possibly be two look alike cats in her backyard and we had only trapped one. Nope, she had never seen the kittens nursing and she had been struck by the fact that the kittens were not affectionate with their “mom”. There was also no sign of a second adult cat. FixNation confirmed that the cat was indeed male, so we will be forever scratching our heads as to how it happened that he moved into Elaine’s backyard with the kittens. Is he the dad? Or a helpful uncle? Did he take over caring for the kittens because something happened to the mom cat? We released the neutered good samaritan male cat back into Elaine’s yard yesterday — hopefully he’ll stick around for the chow. The kittens are taming down nicely, so hopefully this TNR story is one of happy endings for all the kitties involved.
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We had a big feral male cat who would come to eat every night. When he arrived, he’d call to some kittens hiding in the bushes, who’d come running to eat with him. Later the kittens’ mom would come to eat, and the male cat would babysit the kittens so she could eat in peace. The kittens were able to be tamed because their papa would sit off to the side after eating, and was calm when they would come to sniff my fingers.