I’ve had my foster momma cat and her five kittens for a week now, and there have been a few problems.

It turns out the new cats had fleas, and everyone ended up requiring a thorough bath. Thankfully I trimmed the mother cat’s nails before I attempted this. She screamed bloody murder the whole time and even tried climbing up my braids at one point. All in all a pretty decent cat bathing experience, as they go. At least she didn’t try to literally kill me.

She did kind of want to kill me when I was bathing the kittens. One kitten in particular, the orange tabby boy, is a real screamer. As I was carefully trying to bathe him, the momma cat was rhythmically screaming in response to his yelling and would then periodically bite me on the arm. I ended up having to enlist the help of the boyfriend to pet the momma cat for distraction. After a few minutes I could have been doing anything to those kittens and she wouldn’t have noticed. To me she acts a lot like a feral cat that has no fear of humans. She’s very wild.

Another issue is that the previous owner of the cats has been trying to come by to check up on them. I never signed up for that. She also expects to be able to just pick up these kittens once they’re weaned and give them away to all her friends. After seeing the living conditions they were in I don’t think she has the capacity to judge what a good home for a kitten might be. I expressed my displeasure and heard later from a neighbor that she was planning to come and take the kittens back. I don’t even know what that means. You just don’t expect to get sucked up into that kind of drama by taking in a few kittens.

In other weird news I found out today from someone from the newspaper who was picking up a bunch of dumped papers at the property, that the house the kittens came out of was where a friend of her kid’s was killed playing Russian Roulette a couple of years ago. Nice.

Will the city ever actually do anything about this nuisance property?

Not a great photo, but momma insists on keeping them under the bookcase

Everyone in the picture looks a bit chalky because I’ve also been treating their fleas with food-grade diatomaceous earth. It’s non-toxic and safe for kittens of all ages but you still want to keep their little noses away from the dust.