WE HAVE NEW FOSTER KITTENS!

First of all, before I tell you about our new kittens, I will just mention that Hamlet got adopted on Saturday during the adoption event at PetSmart!  Hooray!  We are all very happy for him, especially since he went to a home where he will have a very nice dad and a labradoodle sister to play with.  At least we hope that Hamlet and his doggy sister will like each other and will be good buddies.

Jilly

Meanwhile, Mom spent her Saturday rescuing three more kitties from a barn so that we could foster them.  The way Mom got these kitties was that she drove out to Aunt Linda's house, near Warrensburg, Missouri.  Aunt Linda breeds basenjis, and then she shows them and wins lots of ribbons and stuff.  Mom got her first basenji, Trixie, from Aunt Linda.  I have been to Aunt Linda's house, too, but that was several years ago.  Aunt Linda and Uncle Jerry live in the country, and they have horses and pastures and lots of dog kennels for the basenjis.  Also they have guinea fowl, which are sort of like chickens except they are black-and-white.  They make funny noises, and Aunt Linda says they are really stupid.

When Mom went there on Saturday, she got to see some new basenji puppies, who are 10 or 12 weeks old now, so they are not so new anymore.  There used to be four of them, but now only two are left.  One of the ones that is left is a little black-and-white boy that Mom thought was totally adorable, and she wished she could bring him home to be a little basenji brother for me.  But she didn't because (1) we already have our Legal Limit of Dogs, and (2) a puppy costs $700, which is more than Mom wants to pay for a new dog.  And anyway, she would rescue a dog first or get an adult dog from Aunt Linda, before she would buy a puppy.

Jilly

So after Mom saw the puppies, she rode with Aunt Linda to the barn in a pickup truck.  And the reason they went in the truck was because it was loaded with a bunch of heavy feed bags that needed to go to the barn.  It was a really cold day, and the temperature was like 20º with a wind chill that made it seem lots colder than that.  But at least the wind wasn't blowing inside the barn, so that was good.

There was one horse in the barn, and it was a paint horse.  Paint horses have spots on them, and they are like what the Indians used to ride.  Also some of them have blue eyes, which look really strange in a horse.  And there was also a trailer with lots of bales of hay in the barn, so it all smelled like hay, which is a very nice smell.  Then besides the horse and the hay, there were a whole bunch of cats.

Mom had already met some of the cats because they were very friendly, and they came right up to her while she was on Aunt Linda's front porch, and they even let her pick them up, and they purred.  So then they all went down to the barn when Mom and Aunt Linda drove down there.

Jeeves

Aunt Linda poured out a bunch of kitty kibble into pans and dishes, and the cats all started eating.  Mom tried to count them, but they kept running around from one dish to another, so they were hard to count, but one time she got 22, and two other times she got 21.  So one of those numbers might be the right one.

Anyway, Mom picked out two little tortoiseshell girl kittens, and then she decided to take a yellow tabby boy cat because he was especially friendly and cute.  In the beginning, Mom thought she would only take girl cats because she was trying to find some kittens that were the very most adoptable.  All three of these kittens are Manx kittens, which means they either don't have tails, or they have very short tails.  The two girl cats have tails that are about 4" long, and the boy cat doesn't have any tail.

So Mom packed up the three cats into the carriers she brought, and she put them in her car, and she started driving to the Humane Society so that Dr. Regan could take a look at them.  And right away, one of the kittens pooped, so it was kind of stinky in the car for a while.

"Hey!  Too much love!  Let me go!"

Mom decided to name the kittens Janey, Jilly, and Jeeves.  Janey is the one that pooped in the carrier, and she keeps having diarrhea here at home, too.  Jilly is really small and kind of thin.  Jeeves is the biggest because he is the boy.  Probably they are littermates, because where the girls have yellow patches, those patches are the same color tabby as Jeeves has.

Anyway, at the clinic, Dr. Regan checked out all the kittens and gave them vaccinations.  She said they have their adult teeth, which should mean they are 6 months old, but they are small for their age, especially Jilly.  She thinks this may be because they did not get a lot of fancy, expensive food, like the kind Mom buys for us dogs and cats.  And Jilly may have been the runt of the litter or else the other cats kept crowding her out when she tried to eat.

It turned out that Janey has an upper respiratory infection, so the other two will likely catch it, too.  And Jason and Charlie and Chloe could also catch it, but we hope they won't.  Dogs can't get it because it is a virus that is only for cats.  But dogs can get ear mites, which is another thing the kittens had.  Also they probably have all kinds of worms, even though when Dr. Regan looked at Janey's poop under the microscope, she didn't see any.

Janey, with eye swollen because of
her respiratory infection

Janey and Jeeves are having diarrhea, and now Jeeves has decided he doesn't want to eat very much.  Mom felt a strange lump inside Jeeves, so we are not sure what that is, but Mom did some in-depth research for fifteen minutes or so on the internet, and she learned that if a kitten has lots of roundworms, that can maybe cause a bowel obstruction.  Or maybe it is a hernia or something.  But we don't really know what Jeeves has because we are not veterinarians.

So anyway, our kittens have to stay in their crate in the living room all the time for like two or three weeks because they are being quarantined.  The crate is not a very good sort of quarantine place, but it's the best we can do.  So far, the kittens don't seem to mind being in their crate.  They just sit there and watch everything that is going on, and whenever one of us dogs comes near, they hiss and growl.  Jason would like to play with the kittens, but he can't do that right now because of the fact that they are in quarantine.

Janey

That's all I know about our new kittens right now, so I'm going to stop writing.  Mom says it is very nice that we got some sweet little kittens just in time for Valentine's Day, but I would much rather have a big, juicy bone to chew on!