A few weeks ago, people started saying they'd seen a kitten at the barn where I board my horses. I didn't think much of it until about a week later, when I found a kitten in bad shape in a horse's stall. It was mewing frantically as I rounded the corner, and when I spotted it, it was struggling to get up. The horse's hind foot was hardly an inch in front of the kitten's body.
I ran into the stall to rescue the kitten, but soon after I picked it up, it went into a nearly comatose state. It was barely breathing, its eyes were crossed and unresponsive, and the only sign that it was still alive was the feeble protest it sometimes made by opening and closing its mouth when I moved it around. It was pretty clear the poor thing had been stepped on -- and only just before I arrived on the scene, too, if the frantic cries that drew me were any indication.
I rushed the kitten to an emergency vet, but even after an IV and a cocktail of drugs, it wasn't responding -- it was breathing a little more easily, and that was it. After giving it a little time, I reluctantly gave the vet the go-ahead to euthanize the kitten. As much as I wanted it to survive, I wasn't prepared to spend a thousand or more in emergency care for a stray kitten we weren't even sure would make it.
Even though I knew I had done all I could to save the kitten, and even though I knew I'd given it a more comfortable death than suffering on the floor of that horse's stall, it was a difficult decision to make. I cried more than I thought I would, considering the kitten wasn't even mine. But after having gone through that, when a friend texted me the next day to say that there was another kitten, I knew I had to make every effort to catch it before it suffered the same fate.
It took a few days and ultimately a feral cat trap, but we caught the second kitten. Around this time, I also started hearing reports of a third kitten, which hadn't been seen in a while, and a momma cat, which was seldom seen but still around.
The kitten we did catch was scared at first, but very quickly got used to -- and even enjoyed -- being handled. Now, a week and a half later, she happily seeks out attention. She was clearly not a feral kitten -- at eight weeks, her age when we caught her, she would have had a much harder time getting used to people if that was the case.
It is pretty obvious to me that someone dropped off the momma and her kittens at our barn, probably because they didn't want to have to go through the trouble of finding homes. They probably thought the momma cat and her kittens would become barn cats and live happily ever after. I mean, what cat wouldn't love to run around catching mice all day? Paradise for cats, right?
Wrong. Not only do kittens have no idea that they have to stay away from horses' feet, kittens and adult barn cats have to be worried about being dinner for an owl, fox, or coyote (especially at a barn on the edge of an open space park, as mine is). My mom looked it up and reported that the expected life span of a barn cat is only one to three years -- a fraction of what a happy, beloved indoor cat lives.
Being a barn cat can, of course, be a blessing for a feral shelter cat that otherwise will never be adopted. But it's not a life for a cat that has previously had a home and a bowl of food to eat from every day.
This story has a happy ending for at least one of the kittens -- this little one has found a home with me, and will be spayed, fed, and loved for the rest of her life. But one of her siblings has died, and her momma and at least one more sibling are unaccounted for -- likely dead. Only one out of three (or more) survived more than a few weeks! Does that sound like an ideal life to you?