Goodbye Blue

The cat was in renal failure big time. He did not look happy this morning, so we made him an appointment for this afternoon. He was "Off the charts" in terms of renal failure and also anemic. While he ate fairly well last night, it all came up a couple of hours later and was not terribly interested in food today. It would have been torturing him to bring him home and let him suffer.

I will miss him.

This has been a completely awful year for losing cats. Blue makes 5. I know I need fewer cats, but getting there is just no fun. It feels wrong when the young ones die way before the older ones. We've only lost one old old one this year, although Pink Nose was not precisely young.

The year all of the younger ones were born was the year someone did something in the neighborhood with poison or something and over half the kittens that were born were born dead or dying with their organs exposed. Of course, there were tons of strays around, too. I could never catch them all and have them fixed and it seemed like for every mother cat I did manage to catch and get spayed there were 3 more that appeared out of nowhere. That year was so bad that mother cats pooled their surviving kittens and you'd see 3 momma cats nursing 4 kittens in shifts and the kittens were from all the mothers together. I know they were inbred and immune challenged and probably poisoned with something like DDT, but it still hurts to lose them. Moving out to the country has taken me out of the never-ending kitten factory loop, which I needed both financially and mentally. Blue was like uber kitten and his mother abandoned him at 2-3 days old. He was 2 or 3 times the size of any other kitten I saw at that time so I thought he was retarded because I thought he was a week or two older than he was. He was a real sweet boy, even if he wasn't the prettiest cat.