Doing my bit

I always been a cat lover. Well, not a cat Lover, but a lover of cats...let me start again.

I have always had cats in my life and I adore having them in it. That’s better. I grew up with cats (Jodie and Sorrell, then came Percy), for a few years when I was married I couldn’t have cats, hubby was allergic, but I eventually got them back into my life (Puss and Newk, then later Oren). I enjoy have cats around as they bring me great joy. Of course there have been moments of heartbreak when the dear ones have passed away.

Recently, due to my involvement with animal cruelty awareness (www.oscarslaw.org) and various other rescue groups I have found myself with more cats in my house than planned. After Millie Dogdog came and went from my life in a whirlwind of destruction, I realised that I couldn’t have any dog larger than Cara. I am just not set up for it and despite living a reasonably solitary life, I still have to go to work, so cats it is.

First I adopted a couple of pussy cats that had been in foster care for nearly a year. Jack and Danni. Now I’ve fostered a few myself. I currently have nine cats in my house, four of them kittens between six and nine weeks old.

All the fosters are on behalf of Sydney Pet Rescue and Adoption and are from Renbury Farm Shelter. There is an eighteen month old mum and nine week old kitten. They were surrendered by their owners because, ‘she had a kitten.’ My response was, well, that wouldn’t have happened if you’d been responsible and got her desexed. Mum is called Polly (stoopid name for a cat) and bub is Charley (pictured). Both mainly black with white bibs and socks.

The kittens were dumped by the gate of the shelter in a box. A silver tabby and a tabby are brother and sister are six or seven weeks old. The tabby is less active than the silver, but still mischievous, and the longer I have him, the more he develops. The silver, she’s a little minx. By day they are in large runs, but at night all hell breaks loose...bedlam, but they have a cute factor off any scale that has been devised, so they could pretty much burn down the house and they’d be forgiven.

They tumble, jump, climb, do the sideways fuzzed up crab at anything strange things and at each other, they try to nick Cara’s dinner, they do nick Puss’ dinner, they accept the hisses of the grown up cats un-phased and they make me laugh.

Because they are rarely still it’s not easy getting photos, but I’m working on it in between cleaning up an extraordinary amount of poo. Seriously, for such small creatures they create an awful lot of waste matter. It’s really quite remarkable. If I was a science type person, I’d bet there was some sort of study that could be done on the ratios of waste to body mass.

In the meantime, I shall keep playing and cleaning up after them until they find their furever home (that’s the new cute animalcentric term), and laughing heartily and sharing their antics :-)