Whore

I haven't posted about the dumpster kitties for awhile. No, I haven't stopped feeding them. It's been almost a year and the population has become embarrassingly large. What started as a mama kitty and four kittens (one who unfortunately has since passed on) is now somewhere around a dozen cats. I think originally there were two litters out there: the "gray patterned ones" are the original dumpster kittens and the "black ones" were the hypthesized second litter. (The "gray patterned ones" consisted of gray ones, two of which had black stripes, one is kindof light gray-frosted looking and my favorite is white with gray hooding with black swirls on the hooding. A few weeks after I started feeding the gray ones, I started seeing (I think) three black kittens. I say "I think" because they all looked alike, but the most I ever saw at one time was three.)

A couple of strays latched on to the food shortly after that and a few months ago that same mama had another litter of I think 6 kittens. They are sooooo cute. Three of them are tuxedo kittens, one is all black and two are torties that look a lot like Nellie. I know it was that same mama because one of the tuxedos is not black and white, but brown and white and the brown is more like a tortoiseshell. That's exactly what the mama looks like. One of the "little Nellies" runs at me crying every time I go back there. NONE of them let me touch them which is probably best for everyone involved, including my own three cats at home.

Anyway, as my mom and close friends know, I have very mixed feelings about the dumpster kitties. You may laugh and think I'm just another crazy cat lady, but us crazy cat ladies have extremely complex emotions. I know I won't live here forever and I hate to let them depend on getting food from me. At the same time, I don't feed them nearly enough to sustain them, so they must do just fine on their own. Indeed, I often see them dragging bones and scraps from the dumpster and sometimes I even see them carrying around mice and lizards. Part of me gets so angry that no one else seems to care about them. Then sometimes I see little dishes of catfood left by other people and I start feeling a little possessive. Sometimes I think I really care about them and will miss them when I leave. Other times, like when I see ducklings slowly disappear from our pond I hate them for their natural predatory instincts. Mostly, I feel a little overwhelmed because I know that as long as they stay healthy, they will experience an exponential increase in population. And I will be partly responsible.

I'm fairly certain that the only one having babies though is that same mama that's already had at least two litters. I say "at least" because the original dumpster kittens look eerily like Wrigley, who was also a stray in our complex. Sometimes I wonder about that, too.

The other night I had to pick up a friend from work at about nine. As I was leaving I realized I hadn't fed them yet so I took a plastic bag full of food and drove by the dumpster on the way home. I fed the cats and then got back in the car and shined my headlights on them to watch them eat for a couple minutes. They weren't as skittish when I wasn't standing right there so I got a good look at a couple of them. Then, right in front of my car waddled the mama kitty, her bulbous stomach swaying back and forth. Damn! She's pregnant again!

A couple of them I have secretly given names to. Nothing serious, just verbalizing how I recognize them. My favorite, with the swirls I call Swirley and one of the tuxedos that has white on its face except for a black dot on its nose I call Smudge. The mother of most of them I used to call Mama. Now I just call her Whore.