Sigh.

[conuly]

Down the way a bit, there are two semi-feral kittens, about four months old. Beautiful, really - but bad eye infections. I have had no luck snatching them, and while the guy feeding them gave me the okay to trap them, the person I know with a trap has lost that trap and is therefore no real help to me. They're not consistently enough there that it's worth calling out 311 either.

On to option two - put out small dabs of wet food with antibiotics every day, wait for the kittens to approach and eat them. Worst case scenario, they're cured of the infection. Best case scenario, they eventually chill out enough that I can nab them and take them to the shelter or to a feral rescue organization. They're young enough that they should be able to acclimate to living with humans, provided the humans don't mind shy cats. (I want to TNR the mom, too. Strangest behavior I've seen in a cat - she came up and rubbed between my legs while growling the whole time. Admittedly, she caught me in the act of trying to kittennap her babies, but seriously?)

But I have to move on this fast. The younger you get them, the better the odds. At least they're only semi-feral.

Comments

[alatefeline]

Good luck.

I mind me of a time when I left a fair chunk of my own first-aid kit, with notes written in a foreign-to-me language after much frantic Googling, next to the spot where someone had clearly been feeding some sick little kitties at a hotel.

[conuly]

Poor kitties! I hope your instructions made sense and the medicine worked!

[alatefeline]

*fingers crossed*

I suppose it all depends on what the person/people who'd been feeding them made of it. But by now, those tiny kitties are probably distant grandparents and/or elderly house pets, depending.

[wendelah1]

Good luck with capturing the kittens. We acquired Elmer Fudd when he was literally dropped on our doorstep by his ailing feral mother. My son had to hand feed him. He was still never exactly a people-cat. Although he let my son hold him and pet him, he didn't respond to me or to my husband.

[conuly]

Hand-raised kittens can be really weird, whether or not they're of feral origins.

I'm hoping to find them a home that wants shy cats, though - I don't think Kid Blink is ever going to be super snuggly, or bond with more than one or two humans, and if they're housed together that inclination is going to be harder to fight.

(And for that matter, some cats seem to be naturally feral. They have friendly, socialized mothers, they grow up in a human household, but they just... don't like people. Sometimes you can get through to them, sometimes you can't. My own favorite, Callie, was like that as a kitten. It took three months for her to warm up to me, another year or so to stop hiding from my family, and several years for her to stop avoiding every human but me. She still isn't overeager to see other people, but she purred for the vet last visit.)