A Shutter at the Shelter...

So last night as the evening drew on we slowly got closer and closer with the kittens. We watched them play at a distance, then began to pet their backs, and by bedtime we were wrapping their little fuzzy bodies in hand towels, holding them like ice-cream cones and petting them in front of the T.V. With every passing hour they were getting more accustomed to us.

This morning the kids played with them and then we packed them up to go (again) to a shelter. After driving around looking for the place and with gas prices the way they are I pulled into the parking lot saying to Shauna, "this time NO is seriously not an option for me!"

They told me they were accepting kittens but said, when I asked about their fate, "you can do the math... we get 15 adoptions a day and between 50 and 100 cats dropped off everyday..." Ugh. We waited in line to drop them off at the garage there and started getting some serious second thoughts. This was terrible! I asked a staff worker if she thought they were unusually cute and wanted to hear that they would be adopted but she looked at them and said, "Actually, they are probably going to be put down today because they don't weigh enough to be neutered and adopted out. I about died. It's not like I like cats AT ALL, and I just kind-of started liking these kittens, but dropping them off to a certain death?! I may as well have left them on the side of some road.

I marched in to talk to another lady and told her my feelings on the situation... She happened to be in charge of kitten fostering or something and said she would take our kittens home today to be fostered for a couple months, until they get bigger to come back. Maybe she was lying, maybe not, but I will never have to know. So after some tears of joy shed, we watched them be vaccinated and kenneled then off we went to meet Ty for lunch feeling very relieved.

Talk about draining! I guess to appreciate any of these details you have to understand the problem we've been having in this neighborhood with stray cats and too much reproduction. It's sick and it's a serious problem. So let's hope our kitties 'boots', 'smokey', 'little sugar' and 'spookey' (naming them was our first mistake) are still alive and well tonight. Shauna is a saint for doing all this with me.