The Roadside Artist

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When I found him he was limp, soaking wet, ice-cold - his eyes were open and glassy.. and dead. He didn’t appear to be breathing. One little feral kitten, one more life the world doesn’t care about. Find out about how to rescue and care for feral kittens below. Here is my little Frosty Cartoon….

I thought to myself that I should bury the poor little thing. So I moved him to a paving stone while I finished my chores.

As I picked him up, though, I thought I detected a tiny movement of a paw. It could have just been my own handling… What can I do? At the last minute I decided to try kitty CPR, and when I pumped his chest it looked like his foot moved a tiny bit again … so I took him to my art studio, got out the heating pad and hot water bottles. I held the little lifeless kitten under my jacket while the heating pad warmed up, then I nestled him down on the pad with a hot water bottle and a little makeshift blanket. After a several minutes, a pathetic little ‘mew’ came out of the dead kitten, and that paw moved again….

So now we have little Frosty - one life short of nine. The last thing I need is another kitten to care for, but I couldn’t leave him, so here he is. I called him Frosty because he basically froze to death one cold, wet morning. I don’t know how he survived. Maybe I should have called him Lazarus.

About his personality: He is sweet and very active - but different.. it’s hard to explain. He seems to want to wander and explore - he’s not that interested in being held. But now a few days later he runs to be when he sees me, and he just learned to purr when being petted! It’s cute. He still doesn’t want to be held, though, he wants to go see the world. That trait may have been what killed him in the first place: to just want to explore and not hang out with anyone, even other kittens.

BTW, when I say “he,” that is just a guess. As he grows, I may revise that.

I’d like to see him adopted, but I’m not optimistic. In shelters, most cats don’t get adopted - they get killed. We call it “euthanized” .. a word that just combines Latin words for “good” and “dead” ..as if there is a good kind of dead. But we all know, there is only dead, and there’s nothing good about it. … I can’t let that happen if I can help it, so I will try to take care of Frosty along with the others. I admit, I’m in over my head. What was I thinking? I’m just too soft, I guess. And maybe Frosty or one of the others will find a good home of their own someday. I can always hope!

In the meantime, please help Frosty by purchasing his stuff, available only at my Zazzle art gallery. It may seem silly, but these little items pay for the little lives and their needs. It’s like adopting a needy kitten without having the litter box and all the duties that go with it.

I hope you enjoy the pictures of the little feral kitten who almost wasn’t here. Feral kittens need love, too. And life…. Thank you.

UPDATE Frosty now has a home of his own! Lucky kitty!

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What To Do with a Rescued Feral Kitten:

1. Small kittens need kitten formula to drink. Cows milk will not give them the nutrition they need. You must get a formula for kittens, which fortunately is available at pet stores and farm stores everywhere. If you get powder, follow the directions carefully and blend thoroughly - or get the pre-made formula which is often packed as liquid in small boxes.
Use fresh kitten milk every day, heated to around 105 degrees F (this feels warm on your wrist, not cool, not hot). I usually put the bottle in a bowl of warm water to heat it, making sure that the water doesn’t get into the bottle through the nipple. Don’t use a microwave (same rule for human babies).
The first few times, your little kitten will need encouragement. The nipple won’t feel right to him/her, and the milk doesn’t taste right. Keep trying to gently get the nipple into the mouth, stroke the kitten gently, sometimes very lightly squeeze the bottle to get things started. With your help, she’ll soon learn that the bottle means warm milk, and she’ll get very excited when she sees it.
Holding the kitten when feeding: You have to hold the kitten kind of upright, as if it were sitting up on its haunches - not on its back. This is compromise between nature and human technology. Kittens naturally nurse lying on their bellies and snuggled up to momma, but you can’t get a bottle to flow at that angle. The bottle has to be angled downward so milk can flow into the nipple. Yet if you put them on their backs, they could choke. The compromise, therefore, is that you hold them upright so you can angle the bottle correctly for milk flow.
You will have middle of the night feedings for kittens younger than about 4 weeks. At 4 weeks, you may be able to get them to wait until morning for a feeding as long as you have a late feeding just before your bed time.. How to tell the age of the kitten.
a) Buy the tiny, kitten sized bottle for milk. CAREFULLY snip off the very END most of the tip. You should be able to easily squeeze out milk, but it should only drip and NOT run out if you simply hold the bottle upside down.
b) Clean after each use.
c) Change bottles/nipples about once a week, or more often if you have a problem.
d) After feeding, use a paper towel soaked in warm water to remove milk from around the mouth. THEN use the paper towel to wipe the anal area gently, back and forth. This will cause the kitten to urinate. They need this help when they are very young. Momma cats do this, and it is necessary the first couple of weeks of life. Once the kitten gets to be 4 weeks old or so, it will know to go potty on its own. Until then, you have to help.

2. Provide a warm place to sleep, in a safe place. A carrier with room for a sleeping spot and a feeding area is best, or a deep box. Don’t just leave it loose, you’ll accidentally step on it in the night.
For warmth, I place a heating pad under ONE CORNER of the carrier and turn it on the lowest setting at night. With small or sick kittens, I also fill a screw-top coke bottle with hot water, tightly cap it, place it inside a thick sweat sock and then put it in the box in or near the sleeping area. This provides extra warmth as well as something warm and soft to cuddle with.
There should always be room in the box for the kitten to move away from the heating pad if it gets too warm.
If your kitten becomes chilled, it will not only slow down, but it will also stop being interested in drinking its bottle. This can cause a downward spiral toward death. You can’t fix everything that can go wrong with a little baby cat, but temperature regulation is one of the big things that can be fixed, along with feeding and flea control.

3. Remove fleas daily! This is much more critical than most people realize: Fleas cause anemia and can kill a kitten. Mother cats clean their babies many times a day, which removes most fleas. Without that attention, FLEAS CAN KILL A KITTEN over the space of a few days. You can’t clean a kitten like the mom and you can’t use flea medication or flea shampoo on a small kitten, but you CAN use a flea comb and gently brush it daily: Remove fleas with a flea comb.
When you’re at the pet store, get a flea comb (very tiny tines) and gently comb the kitten every day. I keep a bowl or cup of water next to me to drown the fleas that get caught in the comb.
When the kitten is 8 weeks or so, you can use Advantage or Revolution (which also kills ear mites but you can only get it from a vet).
If your kitten suddenly wants to wander, if it becomes unusually hungry, if it gets weak and doesn’t want to move around or eat, fleas may be causing anemia. It could be something else, but you should try to fix the things that human can fix, while accepting that sometimes there’s nothing that can be done. Flea-caused anemia (which is fixable if caught early) has similar symptoms to acute feline leukemia, which you can’t fix.

4. Take the baby to the vet when you can. Feral kittens usually have problems like ear mites and stomach parasites. Your vet can help you with all of that. The vet can’t cure feline herpes (don’t worry, humans can’t get this) or feline leukemia (also not contagious to humans), but there are many other things a vet can help with.

5. Box training: I make a small “cat box” out of a cardboard and put litter in it. And have this available in the kitten’s sleeping box at all times. It can be as small as a checkbook at first and then you build them bigger as the kitten gets bigger. They will eventually learn to use the box naturally if you do this.

6. The Future: Once the kitten gets passed 5 weeks old, you need to have it loose more often, you need to pet it and let it explore a little. Kittens need socialization.
If you are going to try to give away a kitten after putting this much work into it, make sure it goes to a good home. Trust no one. Verify. We just had s story on TV where a guy was adopting kittens to feed to his pitbull. Be kind and make sure your baby has a good home.
If you keep it, have it spayed/neutered between 5 and 6 months of age and it should get regular vet visits. If you live near a road or where dogs or coyotes run, it is best to keep your pet indoors. This is an area of controversy because it is often said that outdoor cats have richer lives. That’s probably true, but you have to decide if your kitty is likely to be injured or killed. We like them to have rich lives but we don’t want them to be cut short.

And god bless you for being a rescuer. Whatever else you do in your life, you will have been a hero for one small soul. … Here is another take on how to raise an orphaned/abandoned kitten. Try to be a good parent for your kitty - I know you will.

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Lucy is another of the feral kittens that I rescued last year. She’s growing into a very nice cat, if a bit high-strung. But, we all love Lucy! BTW, here is a cartoon-caricature of her:

Get a Lucy ‘I’m Losing It!’ T-shirt for $9.99

Oh, how did she get to be called Lucy, you ask? Well.. because she’s mostly black and white…like the TV show, I Love Lucy. Yeah, it’s stupid, but when you are rescuing feral cats too, then you can be more brilliant.

You can see some of the earliest Lucy pictures and read her early life story here and here. Those posts cover other rescue kittens, including Lucy - but if you look around you’ll see pictures of her when she was VERY LITTLE.

She’s a very affectionate little cat..kind of small and petite. But she is also very opinionated and doesn’t mind expressing her dissatisfaction if things aren’t going her way. Even so, we STILL love Lucy!

Lucy has been to the Vet, so she won’t be having any kittens of her own. It’s one more thing for her to be angry about.

I hope my drawing of her will help earn her some cat food! I like rescuing feral kittens but it is VERY expen$ive. The shirts help Lucy pay her own way in the world. So you can do your part, too.

And I will keep taking care of her as long as I can….

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Oh, Hammie the Cat - the hamster cat, is all too real. This is just a cartoon-caricature of him…

Get the Hammie tshirt for only $9.99

For those of you who have been reading my blog, you know about my rescued feral kittens. I wrote about them here and here, and you’ll see this little guy in both of them: The first rescued feral kitten from last year was the orange no-tail I named Hamster cat. Well, here he is today…

Hammie The Cat tshirt for $9.99

He isn’t exactly tail-less, as you can see - he has more of a POOF-BALL for a tail. I guess you could call it a bobtail ..sort of… More after the jump, including a close-up photo and a the truth about Hammie’s future…

Such a sweet little guy! And life seems so unfair at times.

Hammie “Hamster Cat” is alive and well, thanks to some quick intervention. He is very affectionate, but I think he’s a bit traumatized and has abandonment issues. For instance, he likes to/needs to have a “binky” (a piece of cloth to chew on while he falls asleep), perhaps because he was alone for many days before I rescued him. He was only about four weeks old at the time so I’m sure he was starving. I fed him on a bottle for a while, until he learned to eat solid food. He was really too young to lose his mamma. But then, that’s why I say that life is so unfair at times.

Hammie is always in a good mood, now. Well, he gets lots of attention, so why shouldn’t he feel better? In the cartoon, I imagine Hammie thinking that people are pretty stupid, because he tells us what he wants and we can’t figure it out. How can anyone misunderstand “meow” for petesake?

He is about 7 months old now and has really blossomed since his days as a nearly-dead four week old feral kitten. For his sake, I may do a whole series of Hammie The Cat cartoons. You know, just to help pay for his room and board.

Truthfully, it’s a difficult situation because I have a few other rescued ferals, too, and this gets to be more than a handful after a while. Hammie is sweet enough to be adopted out but homes are few and far between AND his little emotional issues would certainly get in the way.

It can all be very stressful: I already spend more on cat food than many people spend on their own meals for their whole familes. Nevertheless, as long as I am able I will continue to take care of Hammie and his friends. If you get a shirt, though, it will help.

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