Our new cat, or “rescue kitten”, generally known as Gillie (after Julia Gillard), but sometimes as Shadowflit, is now spending most of her time living with the rest of us. This does mean that toes (ours) can be attacked in the middle of the night, but generally is much nicer than having her living in the “office”. At about seven months old she has of course a different character from the nearly 11 year-old “Tashi-of-the-Upper-Terraces-formerly-de-Leichhardt-O’Barry-as-she-was”. G adores T, T’s attitude to G is, I would venture, a smidge warmer than mere toleration. Just a smidge.
As evidence, I adduce a picture of them eating together:
With two terriers, one greyhound, and one cat, it seemed clear that there are enough animals here. But what can you do?
To begin with, I noticed a small, scrawny and totally black cat was often not far from the office door, and seemed to be interested in getting my attention, in a distant and nervous sort of way. The reason became clear quite soon: she had a kitten. Well, at first it looked like “a” kitten, totally black like her and quite bold. In due course we saw that she had two more. One little grey one was either deformed or injured. It could not walk properly, only being able to drag its back legs behind it, and it seemed highly unlikely that it would survive until we could get at all near it. There was also a tabby who kept well back.
Now it is obvious that if you take pity on something like this, it is important to realise that once you feed them you really become responsible for catching and neutering them. Otherwise you are just creating more starving kittens. So the campaign began to create enough trust to be able to catch them. Over a couple of weeks the food bowl was brought closer and closer to the office, so that the mother, Nera as we now know her, would even come inside the office door to eat provided I was right at the back of the room. We stopped seeing the black kitten – perhaps it was too bold and fell prey to something larger. We stopped seeing the grey kitten, which, sadly but unsurprisingly, was not up to the task of surviving. The tabby was also coming into the office. Here they are just outside the door, still having a bit of a suckle:
Apart from being underweight, the kitten had conjunctivitis, hence the squint look.
With a bit of string tied to the door handle it was possible to trap the kitten, but the mother was too wily. So the kitten was taken in and taken to the vet. This was just at the time that Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister, so the kitten was named in her honor. To her friends she is Gillie.
Catching the mother was much trickier, and was only achieved at the cost of some quite serious and painful scratches and bites to Sarah’s arm, which will probably bear the scars forever. However, the job was done, she has been neutered, and although she still lives wild – and probably always will – she is looking better. Nowadays she only has to hunt and scrounge for herself, rather than for her kittens, or to produce milk, or to grow more kittens inside her… Most days she comes for food here, although it will be a while I think before she comes inside again.
Gillard, meantime, is nearly big enough to be neutered herself. Unfortunately Rose, our terrier bitch, is having a hard time accepting that this new interloper is not something to be treated as prey. We are getting there, but it has been a long journey and has a way to go yet, which means that Gillard essentially still lives in the office here, though she comes to spend time with us in the main house in the evening. For the first three months of her life, of course, she never came close to a human being, so at first she was shy. She has, however, grown from a tiny kitten to a small cat, and has quickly learned how to be an office cat: dancing on the keyboard, snuggling on the chair, sleeping between the keyboard and monitor and generally being very appealing. Here is a more recent picture of her taking a Paws Break:
As I said – what can you do? Resistance is useless.
The one really bad thing if that happened on the journey was that Nougat - the greyhound - became extremely ill. Because he, as an ex-racer, was very used to being transported in crates, and because he has such a relaxed personality, he was the last one we expected any trouble from. We actually now believe that the crate he was given was not big enough for him. When he arrived in Milan, the vet thought that he was urinating blood, and was only willing to release him to come to Pontremoli on the condition that he went straight into an animal hospital (not an ordinary vet). As it happened, the animal transport people in Milan found a clinic in Pontremoli on the Internet, and it turned out to be extremely good. So a lot of tests were carried out, and the poor thing had to spend quite a few days and several nights with intravenous drips and on oxygen. When he was allowed home he had to have the cannula kept bandaged in his leg ready for the next treatment, but he was so exhausted, disoriented and stressed that I’m not sure that he noticed. First of all the vets found that there was no blood in his urine, or at least no blood cells, and it was thought that his kidneys were processing blood cells and passing out the haemoglobin. Further tests showed that the red colour wasn’t haemoglobin either, but myoglobin from his exhausted muscles; they came to the conclusion that he had stood and trembled for most or all of the journey. Without expert treatment there is no doubt he would have died, so we are very happy that he is now well on the mend.
The crate he was in was indeed large:
…and the price we paid for his transport was not insignificant. I am sure that the pet transport people who shipped him off acted in good faith, but what is clear is that if you ever want to transport a greyhound a long way you really, really must make sure that his crate is large enough for him not only to stand up and lie down, but also to turn around easily. The greyhound has to be able to turn round, otherwise he cannot go through the awkward process a greyhound needs to get down on to the floor. This will make it even more expensive, of course, and if the price is too much then he or she should stay home. Anything else is cruel and dangerous, sadly.
To add to the samsaric tragedy of it all, having watched green more or less kill black and taken this picture, I accidentally brushed the table with the camera strap, and black fell to the ground, not to be found again.
Wild mammalian games probably appeal to most of us, as mammals, more:
She has no teeth, but you still need to treat the claws with respect!
Nougat is hard to photograph – black fur and white snow are well known problems for photography. So I’m posting this one because, although he’s looking the wrong way, you can otherwise see what he looks like.
Dark coat in the sun
The picture was taken at a school playground/small sports area down the road. It has substantial, 7-foot fences, and although there are four unlocked gates, you can throw a heavy metal bolt across each, so that if someone wants to come in you will both see and hear them. Today is the last day of the school holidays, so no kids, and it’s a working day, so the people who come to play basketball won’t be here for hours yet. A good opportunity to run for joy!
I didn’t know it was one of the wonders of the world until we saw it this afternoon. In a high-fenced playground near here, with bolts across all the gates, Nougat ran for joy. Only for a couple of minutes (which was all he wanted anyway).
So the “45 mph couch potato” woke up for his third morning today. While I was doing my morning chants, it took a mixture of persuasion and trial-and-error (particularly the error) before he accepted that sitting on my lap was just not going to work, and that he would have to settle next to me. At a good metre long with his tail tucked in, he just wasn’t going to fit:
This isn’t the interesting, focussed blog you might have been looking for…
"Pica Pica" is, as I'm sure you knew, the name for the common magpie. It's no more than a collection of bits and pieces I wanted to make available for friends and family. I have other blogs for dharma related material (at DangZang), and a small one for translation at my work site.
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