112 Degrees of Kittens

                I’d rather not say that I am a heartless hellbeast, but I am. Ok, maybe that’s a little extreme but I’m pretty close. Yesterday in heat that would please most hellbeasts I had a wonderful little day planned with Wonderful-Friend. Wonderful-Friend and I were to pick up our first ever set of instructor books for classes we are teaching at a university in the fall semester, have a nice little celebratory lunch together, where we would, no doubt, laugh until we had six pack abs. Hooray for Wonderful-Friend and 6 pack abs! Instead, this happened…

                 Wonderful-Friend and her partner, Awesome-Friend, have a neighbor that feeds stray cats. Stray cats have lots of stray-cat-love and then produce lots of stray-cat-love-children. One of these children was filled less with love and more with maggots and Wonderful-Friend did the best thing and took maggot-baby to a place where it would not have to die baking on the asphalt (see, she is wonderful).

                Despite the less than happy morning she had to endure we were still excited to get books and eat food. Two of my favorite things ever, books and food. Talking about books over food, BONUS! As we were leaving the Wonderful/Awesome household, there were two more stray-cat-love children baking in the sun. These two were not filled with maggots, YAY! But what should we do?

                I have to mention I worked at a shelter for about three years. This was a fulltime job. During kitten season it was an endless parade of citizens with boxes of the tiny results of crazy cat summer lovin’. 40 hours a week and about 3,000 cats a year you get a bit desensitized to not only the fact that there is yet another box of babes coming through the door, but also desensitized to them leaving in a bag out the back door. That is not to say that you don’t care or cry, you just get used to it. There are wonderful organizations that have the time, person-power, and resources to save these boxes of babies but shelters usually aren’t one of them. That is a different issue for a different day (go donate to your local shelter right now, gogogo!)

                So the question of what to do was really a question for me to figure out. Animal questions usually are. Friends call me frequently with pet ailments, when they find an animal, or when they have pet behavior issues they want advice on. I can either help or point them in the right direction, and I love doing it. BUT, I really wanted to have lunch and laughs. Double-but, there was no way I was going to leave the kittens outside. So, we took them with us. I grabbed a plastic container out of my car and put the love babies in it so they wouldn’t roll around in the car and I wouldn’t have to hold them the whole time. They curled up together and slept after screaming and trying to walk, which looked more like swimming because they can’t control their limbs.

                We still had to get our books. We pulled into the parking lot and just looked at each other. What were we to do with the kittens? We couldn’t leave them in a hot car. We thought about taking them inside but realized that might be a bad career move, “Hi we’re here to pick up our materials. We are newly hired instructors. This? Oh, this is just a plastic container of kittens. We are carrying them with us for the day. It was very nice to have met you, we will be teaching your students. Thank you and good day.” We decided to leave the kittens in the car, leave the car on with the AC going, leave the doors unlocked, put The Club on the wheel, and hope no weirdo would steal the kittens. Books retrieved, kittens safe. Right…but we still had the kittens and we were getting so hungry. How would we be able to save the kittens and save our bellies all before I had to go to work? Then I had the best idea. The shelters were just going to put them to sleep anyway and we were hungry so we just ate the kittens and went to Dairy Queen. I made it to work on time and all was well with the world. YAY!

(Keep reading for alternate ending)

                Wonderful-Friend called shelters and the answers were all the same. I sent a text to Savior-Friend who has a Savior-Mom. No answer. We were driving to the shelter where we knew what would happen to the babies. The closer we got the more worried Wonderful-Friend was getting. Just as we were about to pull into the shelter Savior-Friend called! We parked across the street from the shelter in a Dunkin Do-Nuts. In hindsight it would’ve been fun to take the babies into Dunkin Do-Nuts and try to give them to the do-nut workers. We should’ve said our GPS told us this was the shelter and demand that they take the children. Damn it! Good ideas always come too late. Anyway, Savior-Mom is currently bottle feeding the stray-cat-love-children every two hours. Hooray!

                I’m so thankful for Wonderful, Awesome, and Savior friends (and Mom) for making this desensitized hellbeast care enough to do more than drop the kids off at the shelter. Seriously, go donate to your local shelter! If you don’t it’s as if you’re killing thousands of kittens yourself. Ok, sorry, no that’s not true. See, what’d I tell you? Hellbeast.