About six weeks ago, Wendi noticed that a cat hanging around our house was living under our deck with two kittens. We might have noticed sooner (or she may have chosen someplace else) if our deck weren’t a rickety death-trap that urged disuse. Whoever built the horrid thing had less understanding of carpentry than I do, and I am not to be trusted with so complex a tool as a hammer.
Anyway, Operation Rescue the Kitties went into effect. Wendi began spending time working on trying to gain the trust of the mother cat and her young. The mother proved simple; as soon as she started getting kibble, she revealed herself to be abandoned rather than feral. It wasn’t long before she started trying to follow Wendi inside the house.
The kittens were another matter entirely. Barely a month old, they were already well-versed in the arts of running away and hiding. Wendi gradually won them over to the extent that they would play with a string toy, but they still ran whenever she moved.
The road to domestication is paved with food.
Still, we needed to move them inside where they’d be safe, and to do that we needed to get them checked out for contagions. We don’t want to lose our three furry lunatics to a communicable disease brought in from outside!
Wendi cashed in their trust to get the strays into pet taxis, and we took them to our vet for inspection. The mother went first, and she did pretty well but not enough to get a blood draw. Next up was the male kitten.
No sooner did he get out of the taxi than he launched into a realistic impression of Warner Bros. Tasmanian Devil. He ran in all of the directions at once, and by the time we contained him he had drawn some of our blood.
The results of this test were officially recorded as “inconclusive”.
Tales of the Atomic Zombie 