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GenePool
Humor
Catastrophe
You may recall, in my last column in this space, my waxing eloquently on the subject of our sex-starved cats and their hopelessly misguided attempts at reproduction. My bravado at that time was informed by the understanding that we had:
--two neutered adult male cats and
--two precocious but sex-starved female kittens.
Ha ha ha! Silly me. Apparently, I'd neglected to consider the words of wisdom from Jeff Goldblum's character in the classic nature film Jurassic Park. You may recall his comment, when in response to the claim that all the dinosaurs were female and therefore incapable of independent reproduction, that "nature will find a way." I was thinking of this when we discovered, not long after I finished my last column, that Moki (one of the kittens) was with child.
Now, I'm not pointing any fingers here, but evidently, somebody snuck the other kitten-- Pepper-- some frog DNA. I don't know when, and I don't know how. For that matter, I don't even know where he's hidden his testicles and penis, because we've been checking regularly and still can't find them. And the only other possibility is that Zeke, our randy-- albeit supposedly de-balled-- adult male cat managed to grow a new set.
Having never dealt with one of our animals actively reproducing before, we asked around to find out when we should expect to see a litter. (I actually visited the shop where we buy our pet food and talked to the clerk. Her first question was "how many weeks is she?" How the hell am I supposed to answer that? Stick a turkey thermometer up the cat's ass?) The answer was "any minute now."
There's quite a bit of preparation involved when getting your home ready for a litter of kittens.
Step One: take a box and line it with old towels, or clothes you no longer have any use for.
Step Two: set up a bowl of kitten food and a bowl of water in the box.
Step Three: place the expectant mother in the box.
Step Four: place the expectant mother back in the box again.
Step Five: put the box in the bathroom and place the expectant mother in the box again.
Step Six: shut the bathroom door and hope that the expectant mother has figured out by now to stay in the goddamn box.
Step Seven: chase the expectant mother around the house after she sneaks out of the bathroom when your daughter unwisely leaves the door open.
Step Eight: find out where the cat is hiding, and clean out that area in the hopes that the cat stays put and doesn't decide to move onto something expensive. Fuck the box.
In addition to wondering how much of our house the birthing of kittens would destroy, we were concerned that Moki would have the kittens when none of us were home. Given the other pet personalities in the household, this could have been a minor disaster.
Moki: cool, look at what came out of me!
Tine (our oldest cat): I am a god! These whelps must bow to me or suffer the consequences!
Zeke: That one looks like me. I'm keeping it.
Pepper: Let's make more! Now! Now! Now!
Penny (the dog): Is that food?
Moki did end up waiting for us to get home, but not by much. The kids and I arrived at the house at our usual time and proceeded with the nightly "let's find Moki" ritual. We found her walking about the house with a wet and slightly bloody behind. In medical terms, this meant that her "cork popped." But a comprehensive search of the house yielded no trace of newborn kittens. So we followed Moki around for an hour or so to see if something came out of her, shouting out encouraging things like "dear god no, not on the couch!!!"
She finally settled down in the closet of the master bedroom, which had a box in it that was not only not the box we had carefully prepared for her, but that contained a variety of clothes we happened to like. And before we had a chance to move her, we realized there was something else in there with her.
Squeaker is a jet-black kitten, roughly the size of a Beanie Baby. (Coincidentally, we have a jet-black Beanie Baby in our house. When Squeaker is sleeping the only way to tell them apart is that the Beanie Baby still has a tag on its ear.) Now, I don't know much about kittens, but I do know they don't travel alone. So I escorted the kids out and closed the bedroom door so Moki could finish giving birth on our nice things.
An hour later the kids and I were sitting in the living room and bonding with the use of a video game when Becky insisted she could hear this high-pitched squeaking sound. As we were a good distance away from the newborn at the time, I thought Becky was hearing things. Except Tim could hear it too, and soon, so could I.
For reasons known only to her, Moki had managed to open the bedroom door, pick up the baby in her mouth, and take it downstairs. The baby was now under our couch.
Hastily, and without a great deal of forethought, I picked up one side of the couch. Our couch is heavy. It's one of those "sofa-with-a-secret" things, with a reclining option on the left and right sides. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to hold up for any real length of time.
The reason this was a mistake was that Moki wasn't there. We didn't have any clue as to why she dropped the baby off like that, but we were vaguely aware that we weren't supposed to touch the baby ourselves. (We were later informed that the old "mother rejecting the baby if handled by a human" thing is untrue.) But when Tim went and found Moki (she'd gone back to the closet upstairs for reasons only she and maybe God knows) and brought her down Moki didn't pick up her baby for us and go back upstairs, no matter how many times we pleaded with her. So I couldn't put the couch down where it was for fear that I might crush the baby, the children couldn't move the baby without touching her, the cat wouldn't move the baby, and I couldn't stand there all evening holding the couch in the air, because it is damned heavy.
Something had to give, other than my back. I hoisted the couch into the middle of the room, put it down, and picked up the baby in a paper towel. This pissed off both the baby and Moki, who was exceedingly displeased with my decision to carry her newborn back upstairs. (Again, I have no idea what her problem was with our closet.)
I locked them both in my bedroom, instructed the kids to leave mother and daughter alone, and waited for Deb to come home. She'd know what to do, I reasoned, because she is Snow White. Honestly. Lots of people talk to animals. When Deb does it, they talk back.
It soon became apparent that the infant kitten had almost no chance to survive in a house also occupied by me and the children, because not long after I sent Tim and Becky to bed I heard this plaintive screech emitted by my son. Racing upstairs I found Tim had elected to ignore my wishes that the bedroom door remain closed just long enough to peek in to see how the baby was doing. Unfortunately, he did this when Moki was standing on the other side of the door with baby in tow waiting for the door to reopen so she could relocate the baby to some other part of the house again.
Tim opened the door on the kitten. Literally. By the time I got there the door was resting directly over the baby's midsection. Moki was on the hallway side of the door wearing an expression that looked something like "now do you see why I was trying to hide her?"
I briefly considered taking the door off its hinges but A: I didn't know for certain how to do this and B: If I did I certainly couldn't do it quickly. Instead, I reasoned that the real problem was the carpet. When the door swung open the baby ended up trapped between the bottom of the door and the carpet, so, hypothetically, if I moved the door back to where there was no carpet, the baby could wiggle back out again.
This worked, but it ultimately put Moki on one side of the door and Squeaker on the other, and since Moki didn't want to stay in the bedroom she just sat there while her newborn attempted to go back under the door again to get to her mother. So I had to pick the baby up, open the door, grab Moki, reunite them, and put them far enough away from the door to get out before Moki could flee the room successfully.
The first thing out of Deb's mouth when she got home and was apprised of the situation was "where are the other kittens?" This was a good question. Moki had given birth at around seven P.M. Two hours later, Squeaker was still the only one to make an appearance. "Well did you call the animal hospital?" Deb asked. This never occurred to me. Unlike people-- who rarely do this sort of thing out in cornfields any more-- cats are supposed to be able to give birth without assistance, insofar as there are no Lamaze courses in the wild. (To paraphrase Bill Cosby, only humans go to classes to learn how to breathe.)
The hospital's recommendation was to make the cat comfortable and wait, which was what I was already doing. But Deb evidently had a chat with Moki and came up with a more intensive solution, meaning she put the mother and her baby in the box (remember the box?) and stuck them in the bathroom and-- this just shows you the difference between Deb and me-- sat in the dark with Moki, talking to her quietly until she finished giving birth.
This didn't work any better than my "leave her alone" method, so when no more babies turned up after an hour and a half, a trip to the hospital was in order. This was decided after Deb called the animal hospital a second time and spoke to a different person. This one said "oh my god, bring her in immediately!"
Instead of leaving the children unattended, my father-- who, trust me, was absolutely ecstatic about being woken up near Midnight for this-- drove in Deb, Moki, and the kitten. I got to stay at home and wonder if I would piss off my wife and father by going to bed.
In the end it was determined that Moki was fine and not to worry about it. We were supposed to wait and just let nature take its course. Which is, let me remind you, what I was doing in the first place.
The second kitten-- I named him Godot-- was born at around seven A.M., a good twelve hours after Squeaker. A third kitten-like thing was born soon after, but we didn't name it because A: it was stillborn which is good because B: it wasn't fully developed, and as a result C: Moki ate it. Yes. They definitely didn't cover that in Lamaze class.
Tragically, Godot lasted only about thirty-six hours, so Squeaker-- against a variety of odds, up to and including our couch and the bedroom door-- is the only survivor of Moki's first and only (we hope) litter.
We're still pretty sure the father was Pepper.
We couldn't base this on appearance, however, because, of the
kittens who were born and not subsequently devoured, one looks
exactly like Zeke and the other exactly like Pepper. What makes
Pepper such a strong candidate is that he's been marking everything
in the house for the past six months. We thought this was awfully
strange behavior for a female cat, but for a tomcat it makes perfect
sense. I'm just hoping the vet can find out where he's hiding
his testicles.
© 2002, Gene Doucette
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