Well, this is a happy/sad story. This young man, a photographer and musician, was out shopping and he saw a grey kitten under his car who was desperately in need of company, feeding and security. He tried to discover who owned the kitten but nobody did.  He took the kitten home and the little fella settled in beautifully and very quickly. It was perfect for him. Even his dog got on so well with the kitten and vice versa. It was a shoe-in for an adoption by him! But he couldn't do it because he travelled too much. He had to find somebody else to look after the kitten for the rest of the kitten's life and he succeeded because a friend of his fell in love with this little grey fella.  In effect he became a foster carer and perhaps that is what he had in mind at the beginning. He had no intention of adopting the cat so he was doing a cat rescue, no more. That is a very altruistic thing to do because there is no long-term reward for him. There is the reward of helping a vulnerab...

  When a ginger kitten loves his foster dad it can create a problem for the foster dad! People who are foster carers to rescue cats are doing a job and that job is to look after a cat or kitten until they find a new permanent home. If they become that new permanent home their foster caring days are normally over. Perhaps their days as foster carers are not necessarily over but I think you'll find that some or perhaps all rescue organisations insist that their foster cats are kept separate from the resident cat. Cats Protection, the biggest cat rescue organisation in the UK based upon foster caring insist that their cats are kept in a special enclosure which they provide. You can't let your cat mixed with the foster cats. This must be for health reasons. In any case, I was a foster carer at one time and I raised this tiny seven week old kitten who was born feral and the circumstances were such that I was bound to become bonded to him which I did. It was impossible for me to n...

This kitten rescue looks like it took place somewhere in the Middle East or in Asia. It looks wrong to me. What I mean is that it looks as though it was made for YouTube to raise money through advertising. It may have even been set up from beginning to end but I don't want to sound too cynical.  I also don't like the way the rescuer (the video maker) has to hold his smartphone with one hand and remove the sticky tape from the box with his left hand. This slows things down when the kitten needs rescuing as quickly as possible. This hints at the commercialisation of a kitten rescue. Commercialising kitten rescue compromises it. It makes it less effective. In fact I would not be surprised if the video maker put the kitten in the shoe box and sealed it with tape. Then he filmed the "rescue". Where he lives there'll be lots of unwanted street kittens, I'd bet on it. And to let a kitten that has just been rescued run around a garden (it appears to be a walled ga...

The video and the pictures from the video tell you what to look for when sexing kittens. Both the images below are screenshots from the video. The woman is holding the kittens on their backs with their tails at the bottom of the image. I think that you'll agree that the images are helpful. Male Female The important difference to make between males and females is that the female vulva is closer to her anus than the male penis is to his anus. In the adult cats it's about twice the distance at 1 inch compared to half an inch. I think this difference is perhaps the key to sexing kittens.

  This is a bit of teamwork. The girl finds abandoned kittens in a disused outbuilding, in a box. She looks after them and does well because it is very easy to lose kittens to hypothermia and a whole pile of diseases. But then her female cat steps up to the plate and decides to nurse kittens she has never met before. This happens a lot as we know. It is nice to see what I consider to be teamwork taking place to rescue these highly vulnerable kitties. It would seem that the mother cat in this video was already lactating because under these circumstances mother cats readily adopt kittens who are not their own. I have a page on an associated website which tells you how much formula milk kittens need. You can click on this link to read that page if you want to . Bottlefeeding satisfies the suckling urge of kittens but they have to be strong enough to do it. The kitten should be warm and you have to be sure to clean the anal area and the abdominal skin. Bedding should be changed often t...

  This mother cat reminds me of human mothers in supermarkets. In supermarkets where you sometimes find mothers with three or four kids (and a fifth child in a pram), the mother appears to completely switch off. She becomes temporarily deaf and blind. Her kids run amok creating mayhem for others and irritating them while she carries on as normal. This is the way human mothers cope with noisy and boisterous kids. It's a switch off.  It seems to me that the same mentality and approach occurs in domestic cats. Although my impression is that domestic cat mothers are, in general, better than human mothers and that what you see in the video is a genuine tolerance and acceptance of their kittens' behaviour. There are many stories of mother cats saving kittens from dire situations such as fires. They will go to the ends of the world to save their kittens and risk their lives in doing so. I can recall one such example in which a mother cat went into a fire to save her five kittens. She...