[kempster]

I only want to get off this post because I am a Humane Society Director and we see this nearly every week. But, I am always happy to see when people volunteer to do this. Sometimes it is 5 to 8 kittens and they have to eat about every two hours.

Momma cat feeds them then licks their butts to get their bowels working. When you are bottle feeding you need to take a towel and do the same thing until the kitty poops. It takes a special person to do this.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Most of the folks that do this, foster the babies, have experience with doing it (at least the ones featured on Youtube). Ideally, if you can get the kitten situated with an accommodating mother cat, that’s best, but not always possible.

[Hot Tabasco]

I only want to get off this post because I am a Humane Society Director and we see this nearly every week.

Last year at this time I reported a mother yellow tabby with three kittens living under the deck of a house across the street.

I contacted the local humane society and they were filled up then I contacted all the cast rescue groups around my area and they were all filled up with kittens an could not take them in.

One of the kittens was eventually run over by a car in front of my house late at night.

Well, the same momma cat now has three new kittens that have emerged from under the same deck........

My subdivision is being over run by cats and I have no idea how to deal with them........

I love cats but animal services and rescues this time of the year are absolutely useless.

While it's not recommended, I'm at the point to start trapping them and relocating them far, far away.............

[Viking2002]

Little story on how we ended up with our rat pack: we had a neighbor next door to us in our old house who had enough cats to rid the whole county of mice. They were never properly cared for; one or another would get pregnant and drop a litter, and their idea of feeding them was dumping a bag of cat food into the bushes then letting then fend for themselves five days a week. Well, one kitten from a litter took a liking to my wife, and would sit on the window AC in her little den. We had two Dachshunds at the time, so she'd close the door to open the window and let the kitten come in for an hour or so every day. (Now, you know how sensitive a Doxie's nose is, so they'd smell the kitten behind the door and freak out the whole time.) Well, we had a covered porch, and this cat didn't technically belong to us so we couldn't say much as it wasn't on our property, but she got pregnant herself and downloaded several kittens of her own. She was so fond of my wife, she seemed to have waited for her to come home from a business trip to give birth. So, now we have a momma cat who was barely older than a kitten herself, and seven kittens. Several weeks later, tragedy struck and lightning hit our house, gutting it and killing both dogs. Five of the kittens and mama came back in the aftermath, but we'd been displaced with nothing but the clothes on our backs and my wife was fretting about the cats. We finally found some short term accomodations, and went to rescue the cats. We found good homes for a couple of them, my sister and her family took one, and we had two left. She was going by the old house every day to feed and water them, and the grandma to them all had taken to coming over and getting in the house via the dog door in the kitchen. My wife, teary-eyed and lip aquiver, said, "We just can't abandon them!" *sigh* So, we made an agreement: They we all to be spayed/neutered by the time we bought a new house, and she was in charge of litter box detail. LOL One of the remaining kittens ended up getting pregnant before it was her turn to see the vet, but she only had a single kitten in her litter, and it was the size of a mouse at birth. She and her mama lived in a shoebox in the bedroom closet for the first two weeks. The vet later said she wouldn't try to spay her because of her size - it was as though she stopped growing at about 12 weeks, and she only weighs maybe three pounds with a full stomach. She's so tiny she blends into a room sitting in full view. My wife later ran into another vet who said that between her mother's stress and young age, that our micro-cat ended up being the only viable kitten in the womb and was a preemie, which explains why she's still half-kitten. Even her vocalizing is still partially kitten squeaks. So, now we have great-grandma, grandma, brother, sister, and sister's little troublemaker all living indoors with us full-time. Four gray tabbies and a tuxedo cat.

Hell, I just wanted to get a new dog. LOL!