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AT THE
ANIMAL SHELTER A DAY
WITH THE KITTENS |
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My job for the day sounded
simple: Clean three kitten cages in a
small room. The cleaning procedure: 1)
Move the kittens to a smaller cage on the floor 2)
Place fresh supplies (food, litter, padding, and
toys) in their regular cage 3)
Squirt the kittens with a ringworm repellent 4)
Move the kittens back to their original cage. As I quickly learned, this process
is much more difficult than it sounds. The middle cage looked easiest, with
just two white kittens and their mother, so I started there. I took one kitten out, closed the
cage door, and put the kitten in the floor cage; no problem. I took the other kitten out and set him in
the floor cage, at which point the first one noticed that the cage was not
tall enough to keep him from jumping out.
Both kittens jumped out before I could close it, and they were clearly
convinced that it was playtime. I managed to catch one as the other
chased him toward me, but the other had no intention of ever letting me catch
him. Once I accepted that, I decided
to move the mother into the floor cage instead, which thankfully went without
issue. I
finally cleaned the cage while letting the other kitten run around the room
to tire himself out. I eventually
caught and returned him after the cage was ready. As I moved the second kitten back to
the cage, the mother decided that it was her chance to be mischievous. She jumped onto a two-inch-wide ledge on
the wall and wedged herself into the corner behind the cage, where I couldn’t
reach her. I left her there for the
time being and moved on. The bottom cage held kittens
only. I found a way to keep most of
them from jumping out of the floor cage by putting my hand on their noses,
but the last kitten figured out how to open the unlocked door on the main
cage and proceeded to climb the wires all the way to the top of the 7-foot
stack of cages before I took him down.
I cleaned the bottom cage and moved the kittens back without too much
trouble. Another employee came in to see how
it was going. I told him that the
mother from the middle cage was hiding in the corner. He managed somehow to coax her out of the
corner and put her back in the cage.
Two of the three cages were then complete, and he left me to take care
of the last one. The top cage contained six kittens
and a mother, most of which were sleeping.
I moved most of them to the floor cage, and to my surprise, none of
the kittens tried to jump out or run away. The mother was extremely reluctant
to go into the floor cage, but she eventually let go of the wire and allowed
me to put her in. One kitten was still in their
original cage, sleeping in a corner I couldn’t pick him up from, so I had to
convince him to come to me. I picked up a ball and bounced it in
the cage until the kitten woke up. The
kitten was highly entertained by the bouncing ball and watched it wherever it
went, so I hid the ball behind my hand near the cage door. The kitten was curious and came over to bat
my hand repeatedly with its paw until the ball appeared again, and I finally
moved the kitten to the floor cage. This set of kittens made it
difficult to spray the ringworm repellent, because they all insisted on
staring directly at the spray bottle.
I had to summon the ball again in order to distract them while I
sprayed, and then I cleaned their cage as instructed. I opened the floor cage to move the
kittens and mother back, but I found that they were making use of the new
cage for nursing. Not wanting to
interrupt them, I waited until each kitten looked up at me before putting him
back in the regular cage. When I saw only the mother remaining
in the floor cage, I left the main cage’s door open slightly—somehow thinking
that would be safe, because no kitten would dare jump that far—so that I
could more easily put her back in. In
the time it took me to turn around and pick her up, one of the kittens had
already pushed the door open and taken the 5½-foot leap of faith,
miraculously landing on its feet without injury. I put him back and closed the door. I turned to pick up my supplies, and
I noticed that the smallest kitten was still in the floor cage, where his
nursing had been interrupted a minute earlier. As he stared up at me with his sad and
longing “Why did you take my mommy?” eyes, I quickly picked him up and
reunited him with his mother. Finally my daily two hours of work
was complete, so I picked everything up, bid adieu to the rest of the
kittens, and left the shelter with nothing but severe allergies. I was never asked to clean cages
again. |
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