Chapter 3 (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, Cont.)
JUNIE CAT
June turned out to be a wonderful mother cat and mouser, teaching all her kittens how to catch… AND eat mice. A kitten instinctively knows how to kill mice, but if the cats aren’t feral, it takes the mother cat to teach their kittens how to eat what they catch.
Liking mice, as well as almost every living animal, often I would try to rescue them from the cats jaws, not letting them play with their catch if it was still alive. I was more for “catch and release,” if they had to catch anything at all. It sickened me to see them using a dead mouse as a toy.
June only had one litter of kittens a year, and had a terribly hard labor. Heavy with her expectant litter, she would prowl around our two story colonial house looking for a good spot to have her kittens. It was the only time she was quite verbal with her meows. From her first litter of kittens on, I played mid-wife from the point of helping her find a good spot, to the last delivery of kittens.
Juney always chose the closet beneath the attic stairs for her nesting place. There my mother had placed all the unwanted clothes we grew out of or got too ragged to wear. She probably neatly placed all of these clothes in paper bags, but eventually these clothes would be in a heap covering the floor of the closet as it was a good place to hide when I played hide-and-seek with my brothers. It ended up a nice soft, quiet, dark place for June to have her kittens.
June would lie in a position so that I could rub her pregnant belly in empathy with her pain. She’d yowl and push and finally a kitten would crown and slowly slither out. Although I’ve since learned that it is good for most mother animals to ingest the afterbirth, in my pre-school mind, this was gross, so I would take and flush them down the toilet. I remember having the haunted feeling that maybe I had disposed of a kitten that way, as the kitten was usually born first, and washed by the cat by the time the next thing born was the afterbirth. I was so afraid that that mess was actually a dead kitten… but that didn’t occur to me until later upon reflection, and then I felt guilty as maybe I could have saved its life.
I don’t know what I thought about all this bloody process of procreation. At the time I think I was mainly worried about June. They say that giving birth is a natural and painless function in all animals but humans, but I witnessed a different story. But I do remember the healing emotion of seeing something newborn, and remember how it filled me with such wonder when I held these tiny, blind, warm, tongue-dried balls of fur.
JUNIE CAT
June turned out to be a wonderful mother cat and mouser, teaching all her kittens how to catch… AND eat mice. A kitten instinctively knows how to kill mice, but if the cats aren’t feral, it takes the mother cat to teach their kittens how to eat what they catch.
Liking mice, as well as almost every living animal, often I would try to rescue them from the cats jaws, not letting them play with their catch if it was still alive. I was more for “catch and release,” if they had to catch anything at all. It sickened me to see them using a dead mouse as a toy.
June only had one litter of kittens a year, and had a terribly hard labor. Heavy with her expectant litter, she would prowl around our two story colonial house looking for a good spot to have her kittens. It was the only time she was quite verbal with her meows. From her first litter of kittens on, I played mid-wife from the point of helping her find a good spot, to the last delivery of kittens.
Juney always chose the closet beneath the attic stairs for her nesting place. There my mother had placed all the unwanted clothes we grew out of or got too ragged to wear. She probably neatly placed all of these clothes in paper bags, but eventually these clothes would be in a heap covering the floor of the closet as it was a good place to hide when I played hide-and-seek with my brothers. It ended up a nice soft, quiet, dark place for June to have her kittens.
June would lie in a position so that I could rub her pregnant belly in empathy with her pain. She’d yowl and push and finally a kitten would crown and slowly slither out. Although I’ve since learned that it is good for most mother animals to ingest the afterbirth, in my pre-school mind, this was gross, so I would take and flush them down the toilet. I remember having the haunted feeling that maybe I had disposed of a kitten that way, as the kitten was usually born first, and washed by the cat by the time the next thing born was the afterbirth. I was so afraid that that mess was actually a dead kitten… but that didn’t occur to me until later upon reflection, and then I felt guilty as maybe I could have saved its life.
I don’t know what I thought about all this bloody process of procreation. At the time I think I was mainly worried about June. They say that giving birth is a natural and painless function in all animals but humans, but I witnessed a different story. But I do remember the healing emotion of seeing something newborn, and remember how it filled me with such wonder when I held these tiny, blind, warm, tongue-dried balls of fur.
posted by Cranberry Jo @ 9/02/2007 01:23:00 PM
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