tiny fluffy things

It was a strange week full of baby animals and feeling tiny heartbeats in my hand. Our rabbits turned out to be a male and a female. And so you know, rabbits... When I realized the female was pregnant, I thought, well, it will be an interesting experience for the kids (I had no idea). I finally found a vet that will fix the rabbits and I planned that after they had their litter, they could go for a little procedure in the vet's office. I thought it would be nice.

We have two cats so I was very worried about these baby bunnies. I tried to get the mother to have them in the kennel. I brought her in every night. But she somehow, despite my best efforts, made a nest at the base of a tree and had her babies there. Her burrow was well hidden, I couldn't find it and the cats didn't find it for a week. When Cookie proudly came into the house with a tiny bunny in her maw I was horrified. I quickly found the nest and covered the air hole with chicken wire so the cats couldn't get in. There appeared to be five or six more babies and the nest was ingenious.

I was so impressed with Hiphop (the mother rabbit) and her nest. She would dig a passage into the burrow and cover it back up when she was done. (The opening I had covered with wire was just an air-hole through the roots of the tree.) I was amazed by nature. I read about rabbits on the internet and was fascinated. Rabbits don't lie with their young. They nurse them twice in a 24 hour period. They don't hang around their babies, and humans often mistake this behaviour for neglect. I decided to let nature take it's course and didn't interfere. I made the kids stay away from the nest, and really thought I was doing the right thing. Until Wednesday, my girls really wanted to see the babies. The baby rabbits would be about 10 days old. I was curious too, so we locked the cats in the house and with happy anticipation, we went over to the big tree.

I moved the wire and immediately knew something was wrong, from the smell, and the flies, and the biting black ants streaming into the burrow. There was one live baby left; it was so weak, it only lived a couple of hours after we found it, and it smelled like it was already dead. Horrible. And really hard on my girls.

I don't know why the mother abandoned the nest. The whole thing was so tragic and awful. I will definitely not be attempting rabbit husbandry again. I don't have the guts for it.

The whole thing was so disturbing, that when we rescued a baby bird that had blown out of it's nest on windy, Saturday morning, I felt sick to my stomach. Amazingly, The cats hadn't hurt the little thing. We couldn't find the nest (I suspect it's in my neighbour's yard). It was too small to fly, so we took it to the rehabilitation centre at Parque Metropolitano. They happily accepted it and told us it was probably a Ruiseñor (Southern Nightingale-Wren). So, we rescued a songbird. It didn't make up for the baby bunny horror show, but I felt a little less lousy and I know my girls did too.

a minor procedure

Mowgli Von Bogler

  We had a quiet weekend.  The most notable thing that happened was we got our cat neutered  (poor fella).  I think sterilization must be that cat-equivalent of alien abduction.  The what the.... look on his face when he woke up from the anaesthesia was kind of unmistakable.  I feel a little bad for him, but there are a lot of strays in our neighbourhood and he seemed to be getting his butt kicked fairly regularly out on the street.  I hope this curbs his urges and keeps him out of fights.  Also, I'm not interested in contributing to an already out of control cat population.  He had his procedure at Spay Panama, a wonderful organization that does sterilization clinics all over the country as well as their regular clinics here in the city.

the cats that live at my house

About a year ago I was on my way to the park when I heard the cries of a young kitten; insistant and constant.  I looked and found her in the garbage.  There are quite a few street cats on my street and I assumed she had just gotten separated from her mother.   When I was heading back it was starting to rain, and she was still there crying pitifully.  I tried to grab her but she ran off.  The next day, on the way to the park with my girls, the kitten was still there and crying loud, constant meows, I don't now how the neighbours could stand it.  I told the girls if she was still their on the way home, we would take her.  This of course was easier said than done.  Even though she was tiny and half starved, it took three adults and three kids to catch her (she bit one guy trying to help us).

Hungry, dirty, and full of fleas Cookie came into our lives.  She was too small for solid food when we first brought her home.

But within a couple of weeks she was eating kibble.  As a little kitten, she spent a lot of time with the kids, I would often find her sleeping in the doll house while the girls played beside.  She has grown into a lovely cat and we all adore her, even my, not very pet enthusiastic, husband.

A few months after we found Cookie, as I was getting up to start lunches and breakfast, I coud hear a kitten crying.  I opened the front door just in time to see a tabby kitten running away.  On our way home from school I told the girls to keep an eye out for him.  We saw no sign of him until we got to our house and there he was meowing under the hedge.  This is how Mowgli came to live with us.

Mowgli was very wild.  Already able to eat solid food, he was not that hungry and the flea bath traumatized him.  He spent the first week under the cupboards.  I told the girls we'd take him to get fixed and release him back to the street; he seemed so miserable and scared.  But somehow he came around.  He doesn't like the kids as much as Cookie does but he's very affectionate.

Cats are really not ideal pets in the tropics because they kill stuff, and there are so many little creatures for them to hunt here.  Every lizard and bird that they kill is a tragedy and I really wish they didn't.  But Mowgli killed a rat that ran into the house the other night (that was me shrieking, up on the kitchen counter) and that seemed much more felicitous than tragic to me.  There are rats here and when the rain starts they try to move in where it's dry.  So I forgive dear Cookie and Mowgli their bloodthirsty ways.

Occasionally since I've been here in Latin America, I've encountered some pretty incredible superstition about cats.  I remember in Costa Rica, this one woman telling me how cats can steal your soul when you sleep and she was not joking.  She seemed to attribute all crib death to cats.  A lot of people in the countryside seemed to think cats were evil, dangerous and dirty.  You really only saw cats as pets in foreigners' houses.  The city is different, and here in Panama I've met quite a few people with pet cats.  So I was a little surprised when my daughter encountered the whole evil cat thing in the playground.

There's this girl we sometimes see at the playground, who verges on bully.  She's more feared than liked and honestly seems really unhappy.  I keep a close watch when my kids are playing with her, but kids know, there is always wariness when she approaches the group.  The other day she told my daughter in hushed, scandalized tones that "cats are the only animal that isn't in the bible."  This information was supposed to make my daughter feel bad or deviant for having pet cats.  The stupidity of it just kind of baffled her.  'What is that supposed to mean?"  We laughed all the way home to our devil cats.