Yesterday, I did not bring a cat home.
This was… tricky.
One of my co-workers brought four kittens into work. They were *tiny*, and my only picture is pretty blurry, but they’d been abandoned under her porch and she was taking them to the SPCA.
You could hear them (down the hall, around the corner) in my office, and their little squeaks and cries just hit me in the gut.
They weren’t cuddly; they were scared and crying and altogether not interested in bonding, and that was probably the best thing, because, well.
We have three cats.
Three is enough.
At 5:30 in the morning, trying to get from the “dining room”* down a step into the kitchen to get the cat food while impeded by all three – three is almost too many.
Four would be, uh. Four would be loud, and I’m not certain they wouldn’t think the tiny thing was a prey animal, and Merit and Theo already don’t get along that well and –
and adorable kitten.
So adorable. So loud. So tiny.
It was really, really hard. I mean, I seriously considered it. I asked T. (He said no. Three was enough.). I sent him a blurry photo. I listened to the kitties squeak some more. I thought about plans for bottle-feeding kittens and if I could convince Oli, at least, that Tiny Loud Thing was family.
I asked T again.
But I did not bring a kitten home yesterday. And that was probably for the best.
(the eensy claws! The angry little meow!)
* I mean, it’s obviously designed to be the dining room. It had a chandelier when we moved in and everything. It’s T’s office/my hang-out-with-T office, and the place where the guest bed currently sits.
Adult mammals are well-tuned to respond to the cries of baby mammals, across an impressive range of species. Nature is heartless and quite willing to use ours against us.
Three is a fine number of cats. If you *need* another cat, I suspect said cat will turn up on your doorstep and demand to be let in, not unlike Meritocracy. These kittens were clearly targeted at your co-worker, who may or may not successfully say no, but someone will take them in and they will be okay.
…You have a very good point. Merit was For Us. She has been very clear on that for a very long time.
(I sort of wish dogs did that, but dogs are less free-range than kittens around my place).
And… YES. Yes, it was like a baby crying in a grocery store. NEEDED to help.
<nod>
I’m under the impression that the northeast has taken spaying and neutering pets sufficiently to heart that there are fewer pups here than people who want to adopt them, and dogs are brought in from shelters in other parts of the country where there’s less demand. That seems not to be true of cats (here? yet?), despite trap-neuter-release programs — more feral cats, more people willing to feed them, more history of self-managing barn cats than of human-approved feral dogs.
Since barn cats are generally a plus until you have way too many of them.. .I can see it being that way. I know Cap(riox Bovidae) works with local vets to spay her barn cat population, but it can be tricky.