A heartwarming (at the same time, heartwrenching) story:
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Woman rescues feral youngsters
Published: 09:17 p.m., Thursday, March 25, 2010
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/loca...ers-422975.php
Cora Martino nurses a feral tiger kitten born on Sunday, March 21 in her home in Stamford, Conn. on Wednesday, March 24, 2010.
See photo attachment below
The kitten weighs maybe 5 ounces, its ears still flat from pushing through the birth canal, its eyes unseeing. It is covered in fur, a gray tiger stripe, but it's still too young to meow. It makes a peeping noise.
Cora Martino feeds the newborn with a tiny bottle containing a formula called Kitten Milk Replacement and goat's milk. Kittens cannot digest cow's milk.
After the kitten drinks about a milliliter of formula, Martino puts it on her shoulder and taps its tiny back until it burps.
Then she wraps it in a blanket and holds it near her chest, for warmth and the sound of a heartbeat, and the kitten sleeps.
It was born last Friday in the three-car garage of a luxury condominium in Greenwich, in a box containing an old lamp. The condo owner didn't want the mother, an abandoned cat, in the garage and locked her out.
The kitten and two siblings went without food for two days, until the condo complex manager found them, tried to feed them, had little success and brought them to Martino.
"When I got them, one still had the umbilical cord attached," Martino said.
The orphan kittens likely will survive. Over time, Martino will get them vaccinated, neutered and find them homes.
They will not join the proliferating population of wild cats, which have the first of the year's litters in late March.
"Every spring I get so many kittens that I can't keep up with them," Martino said.
She recently started a little non-profit, Pitter Patter Feline Rescue, to save newborns, and now is bottle-feeding the three orphans and five more kittens born at her Stamford home to a cat rescued from a junkyard.
On the streets now, kittens are being born in empty lots, under garbage containers, in rock walls, parking garages, boatyards and sheds. Many are killed by rats, dogs, skunks, raccoons, opossums, coyotes or hawks, or they drown in rainstorms, get hit by cars or die of illness or starvation.
Martino placed one of the kittens next to her TV remote control to illustrate their helplessness. The kitten was thinner and shorter. It is difficult to imagine how one would survive the streets.
They must be fed every three to four hours. If Martino doesn't get enough donations, she pays for the food herself -- Kitten Milk Replacement costs $5.99 a can; goat's milk, $3.99 a can; food for the mother cat, 50 cents a can.
"For two weeks, all they will do is eat and sleep, and the mother will need a lot of food to keep up with feeding them," Martino said.
The kittens Wednesday piled up beside their mother on a soft pad in a box in a cage in Martino's home. One fell asleep with a nipple in his mouth, and another nudged him off. One kitten slept on his back with paws in the air; another was buried, except for her face, under two siblings. Two other kittens pawed at each other in a battle for the same nipple.
"Sometimes the mother wraps her paws around them. Their behavior is very much like a human mother," Martino said. "When they start to get teeth, one will occasionally bite her, and she'll pop him on the head with her paw."
This spring, the scene will repeat hundreds of times in garages and garden sheds, beneath parked cars and overturned wheelbarrows. Half the kittens born outside will die and half will live to create ever larger colonies of wild cats.
"These colonies are made up of cats that once were people's pets," Martino said. "Cats on the streets are having litters younger and younger, and kitten season is getting longer and longer."
If they matured on the streets, the eight kittens in her home "would create a huge colony," Martino said. Six are females that would have their first litters in about six months. They would have four to six kittens each litter, two or three times a year.
People put the cats on the streets without spaying and neutering them, and without consequences, Martino said.
State law requires only that municipal shelters handle dogs, and the Connecticut Humane Society closed its Stamford shelter in 1998. To fill the gap, volunteers formed small non-profits such as hers, and Martino hopes that, since the longtime president of the humane society, Richard Johnston, resigned last week amid a state attorney general investigation into its finances, the society will use some of its multi-million dollar endowment to help pay for spaying and neutering of street cats.
The kittens in her home will be ready for adoption in about two months.
Pets cannot be thrown away, Martino said. She thinks they offer a lesson -- respect all life.
"You can't do this and be selfish," she said. "It teaches you to be humble."
Martino cannot accept cats that owners want to give up.
Woman rescues feral youngsters
