Dear all,
I live in a tiny, isolated village in the mountains of southern Italy.
Below my apartment balcony, across the lane from me, is the backyard of one house, which is connected to four other backyards or gardens. It is all fenced, so dogs cannot get in, but cats can. Several years ago an abandoned female cat entered there and began having kittens. A woman who loves animals but is too squeamish to allow them near her began feeding them regularly. In the spring and summer the abandoned female gives birth to kittens, but because there are no covered areas around these houses or gardens, in the fall and winter most of the kittens die.
In February 2012 there were living in the garden the original female (“Arancione” - Orange) and two adult daughters of hers (“Bianca” – White, and “Grigia” – Grey). In late February one of the daughters, Bianca, gave birth to about five kittens, apparently all males. A month later, her mother gave birth to about five kittens, probably three females and two males. Bianca and her mother, Arancione, nursed the kittens together, indiscriminately (or at least so it seemed). In late July the other daughter cat, Grigia, gave birth to six kittens. So starting from 3 cats in February the population exploded to 19 cats by the end of July, all of them feral and terrified of being approached.
The three broods of kittens spent most of their time growing up in the small, backyard garden of the woman who gives them the food. But of the 5 interconnected yards or gardens hers is the lowest, dampest, and coldest (lots of mosquitoes), and because it is shaded by the woman’s house the sun does not reach it for about 6 months of the year.
In late September the woman let various people come to try to take some of the 6 smallest feral kittens – those born in late July – but they merely scared them and did not succeed in catching any of them. Eventually one boy came and chased the kittens around the garden for 30-45 minutes before succeeding in catching one who was blind due to infections in both eyes. This episode traumatized all 6 of them and their mother: the mother vanished – presumably to look for her lost kitten – and we heard later that she was hit by a car and died slowly and terribly. At that point it was early October, and the weather turned cooler and rainier, and without shelter and a mother the youngest kittens began dying one after another. (At that time all 16 of the kittens were weaned, and ate from the woman in the company of their mothers.)
In early October I saw one of these youngest kittens that was wandering around blind, with both eyes closed by infections, unable to descend the staircase down to the place where the woman throws the food. Rather than let it die of hunger in the cold, I brought it home and nursed it. When I brought her home (about 7-8 weeks old) she was a skeleton, with nothing between her ribs, and her face was encrusted with dirt and feces because none of the other cats was licking her but all of them shunned her (she smelled awful). But by feeding her well and washing her eyes and face 3-4 times a day with chamomile tea I was able to bring her back to health: on the 6th day one of her eyes opened, and on the 8th day the other eye opened. On the 9th day I talked to someone who was interested in adopting her, but that evening she suddenly collapsed: I found her prone, with the contents of her digestive tract in a pool around her, and her body empty and limp like a bag. I tried to warm her, but she soon began having little spasms or gasps every 12 seconds, and died that way after about 45 minutes.
During the same week, two of her 4 siblings remaining in the garden also died, without any symptoms. (The woman had put out some cardboard boxes for the cats to sleep in, and the smallest kittens slept surrounded by the larger kittens or cats, but the boxes all got soggy in the rain and collapsed.) A few days after the sudden death of my formerly blind kitten, I succeeded in capturing her last two remaining siblings from the garden and taking them to a man on the edge of village who has some land with sunshine, covered places, a chicken coop, an adult cat, and two kittens perhaps two weeks older than these two (who were then about 8-9 weeks old).
The two kittens that I took him were both alive and well: one of them had been a bit sluggish in the garden the day previously, but the other was the biggest and strongest of the 6, and at night he would go out with the larger kittens (then 7-8 months old) and travel around the corner and come up into my apartment, where he would roam around with the others and go out onto my balcony to look down over the garden.
Of the two kittens that I took down to that man (out of an original litter of 6), the one that had been sluggish the day before died the second night – with no symptoms but simply a lack of energy – and the other, the strongest of the litter, died a few days later, as did both of the healthy kittens that the man already owned. And I subsequently learned that the boy who had come in late September and taken away that one (blind) kitten had taken it up to their farmyard up in the mountains, leaving it to sleep in the cold among sheep and dogs, and it died very soon. So in the space of about 23-24 days, Grigia and all 6 of her kittens were dead.
In the meantime, in mid-October one of the (female) kittens from the original female stray, Arancione, vanished and we presumed here dead. Subsequently one of her brothers got hit in the head by a car and died instantly. But the remaining three kittens from this brood of 5 born in late March or early April are alive and quite well.
I am writing to ask your help about the adolescent kittens of the remaining cat, Bianca. She was the first to have her kittens, having probably five males in late February or early March. When her mother, Arancione, gave birth to a brood a month later the two mothers shared the feeding of the kittens. In June the woman asked my help in making the kittens (10 at that time) more approachable, so that we would be able to give them away to people as pets. I set to work, and by devoting some time every day I was able to establish contact in late June with several of the kittens of Bianca. One became very cuddly and friendly early on – and at this moment he lies dying in my kitchen without apparent symptoms – one was initially very difficult but after much effort became friendly, one was very shy but would let me pet him if I snuck up on him from behind, one was extremely shy, and one was independent and never came near me.
In early October the one who was independent began roaming farther afield and not coming to the feeding sessions – either the woman’s in the morning or early afternoon or mine in the late evening. (About the same time, as I mentioned, one of the females of that other daughter cat suddenly vanished.) Then, as I mentioned above, the tiny kittens of the last daughter cat (Grigia) began dying one after the other.
In the midst of this, that kitten of Bianca’s that would let me pet him if I snuck up from behind – named “Andrea” (Andrew) and then about 7-8 months old – stopped eating: he would come out with the others to my feeding sessions, but he would not come near the food. I tried everything. For the next week or so he continued to move about during the day, but spent the nights in a cardboard box that he found in a hidden little cubicle under the woman’s house. By October 10 it was clear that he was deteriorating: he would drink copiously, and vomit a clear fluid, but eat nothing. On the day after my formerly blind kitten died, I grabbed this adolescent kitten who would not eat – I called him “Andrea” (Andrew) – and brought him around the corner up to my ground-floor apartment. But he immediately began roaming about anxiously and meowing pitifully, desperate to leave, so I opened the door and let him go. (This was not his first time in my apartment, because since July or August he sometimes accompanied his siblings when I led them around the corner to my apartment door by dropping pieces of ham along the way.)
The next day I saw him on a windowsill next to that cubicle, shivering and looking much worse, so I grabbed him again and brought him home with me so that at least he would not die in the cold alone. I set up for him a nice, sheltered nest in a box in my bedroom, but he preferred to hide under my bed. So I put some clean rags under him – the floor tiles are rather cold in October – and when I saw that he was trembling I put a shirt over him and placed a space heater nearby.
That was in the early afternoon. On the next day he seemed to be doing better. He had stopped trembling and vomiting, and instead of trying to “sleep” while erect on his front paws he had relaxed down onto his elbows, and eventually felt comfortable enough to curl up for some deep sleep. But he still wasn’t eating, and he had even stopped drinking, and when I pinched the back of his neck I saw that he was extremely dehydrated. Because I was penniless and had no money or transportation to take this stray kitten to the nearest veterinarian in another town about a half hour from here, I followed some instructions that I found online and began administering to him a few times per hour – in the mouth via syringe – a solution of water with honey and a little salt and baking soda. He accepted that well at first, but he continued to become dehydrated every time he urinated.
On the evening of the second day a couple of his brothers and cousins came up to the apartment, so I let them mix with him to cheer him up. But he had no interest in being with them, and instead became agitated and began trying to climb up the doors in order to go outside. He was full of energy, but frantically desperate to leave. In the end I compromised, taking him in my arms for a brief, 3-minute walk down to the garden (the area he was familiar with) and back. During that time he defecated in my arms, and began shivering again, so his desire to go outside passed quickly.
That evening I continued to watch over him in my bedroom, moving the space heater closer or farther away depending on what he seemed to want. But at about 10:00 PM he began to look rigid and hunched up again, and I discovered that he was dehydrated again. I cursed myself for putting the space heater too close to him and pointing it at his face instead of at his side, and I increased again my oral administrations of honey solution. But he began resisting the syringe, becoming rather violent. In addition, I noticed that he was urinating closer and closer to the time that I gave him water by syringe. After midnight he became restive, and began staggering about a bit, slumping against the wall, urinating where he sat, and so on. In the end, by 2:00 AM I realized that his body was not retaining fluids at all, that it had gotten to the point that water I gave him in the mouth by syringe was coming out the other end in something like 30 seconds.
Searching around online, I discovered that lack of fluid retention – as well as distaste for solid food, compulsive water drinking, and shivering – is a symptom of acute kidney failure. Essentially his kidneys were shot, completely destroyed. The only way to save him would be dialysis, for months or years. I sorrowfully broke the news to him at 2:20 A.M., and he rapidly deteriorated, lying prone, and passed away about 45 minutes later.
About a week later, that brother of his who was more independent, and who early on had stopped coming to our feeding sessions, reappeared in the garden. He was showing all of the same symptoms as his recently-dead brother Andrea: compulsive drinking of water, sluggishness, sunken eyes, disinterest in food. He vanished, and presumably died.
In late October, as I mentioned, one of the March-April kittens of the original stray cat (Arancione) got hit by a car and died instantly. But his 3 remaining siblings (2 sisters, 1 brother) are alive and very well, and spend every night in my kitchen.
In short, of the five kittens born to Bianca in February-March, two of them died of acute kidney failure, but the remaining three were fine for three months through mid-January. Then about a month ago one of them – Roberto, the one who initially had been difficult but later allowed me to touch him and even became my closest friend, always running alongside me with leaps and bounds whenever I went out – became sick with a cold or flu. On a Saturday his nose began running and he was sneezing, and he stopped eating solid food, on Sunday he was very much under the weather, and on Monday and Tuesday I took care of him intensively, keeping him covered and giving him honey-water and a little milk.
I was worried that he might not survive, but by Wednesday morning he seemed to be recovering, and at 10:00 in the morning he insisted in climbing – rather awkwardly and feebly – up to the kitchen window and going outside. I accompanied him down to the corner, where he entered into one of the gardens. Later on I caught sight of him again from my balcony, and I saw him in his usual place – lying down in the sun in the second of the five gardens. But then a rainstorm came, and I went down to look for him, and at about 2:00 PM I found him wisely taking shelter under the staircase down to the woman’s garden, so I took him in my arms – with much resistance since it was the first time ever – and carried him back up to my kitchen.
The next day, Thursday, although I had kept the kitchen window almost completely closed he somehow succeeded in climbing up and slipping through, and I could not catch him before he vanished around a corner in the midst of a torrential rainstorm. (Around that corner is an abandoned storeroom where the family of cats – 6 at that time – liked to spend their days or nights if the weather was bad, sleeping all in one heap.) He evaded the rainstorm by remaining close to the house with its overhanging eaves.
At 5:15 PM that day I caught sight of him again from my balcony. It was getting dark, and he was at the tiny public fountain installed below my balcony and across from the gate to the woman’s garden. I went down, grabbed him, and brought him home. He was feeling better: his nose was still dripping but no longer covered with mucus, it did not hurt him when I wiped it, and he enjoyed having me stroke his stomach. At 6:00 PM I had to go out for some errands, but because all of his 5 siblings/cousins were already in the kitchen or on the windowsill, and because he never went out in the evenings, I left the window open. When I came back at 7:00 PM all 6 of the cats had vanished. I had covered him with a cloth, and I found the cloth midway between the kitchen table (under which he and his siblings/cousins liked to sleep together) and the window. Two of his siblings/cousins came back later that evening, and the other three came back in the morning, but I never saw poor Roberto again. I hunted for him and called for him everywhere that evening, and during the night it snowed a couple inches. I looked for him everywhere for the next two days, checking every hole and ditch and window in the village, but I never found any trace of him, and the garbage collectors did not pick up any dead cats either.
I do not think Roberto “went away” when he thought death was near, because 1) he was improving, and all of the symptoms of his cold were passing, and 2) cats who hide when they are sick go into low, dark, hidden, cool places, and during his cold he had gone into such a place in my kitchen, but on Wednesday and Thursday when I saw him outside he was in very open, exposed places.
Roberto vanished on Thursday, January 17. That left behind two brothers of his from among the five born in February-March to Bianca, and three adolescent kittens from the March-April litter of Arancione. (Although I list them separately, the two sets of siblings act as a single, loving family, spending all of their time together.)
On Monday of last week one of the two remaining adolescent kittens of Bianca began coughing. I call him Stanislao (Stanislaw), and he was always extremely timid and afraid of me, but because he always slept with Roberto (as did the others), during Roberto’s sickness when I would reach back into their box to pet Roberto I would also touch Stanislao, and he came to like it. By last week he had become extremely cuddly, and enjoyed having me rub his stomach, but only if I snuck up on him from behind or began petting him while he was reposing with another cat.
Stanislao’s nose remained dry all along, so it was not a cold or flu. On Tuesday morning he went out with his other 4 siblings/cousins, but in the evening did not return. I went out to look for him, and at about midnight I found him in that cardboard box in the cubicle under the woman’s house, the place where his brother Andrea had spent his last days with worsening renal failure before I brought him home in mid-October to let him die in my home. I picked up Stanislao in the box and carried him up to my apartment. He meowed pitifully several times along the way, but I tried to reassure him. When I put the box down in the middle of the kitchen floor, where his siblings/cousins were milling around playing and feeding, he immediately jumped out of the box, climbed out, and fled through the kitchen window. I carried the box back down to the cubicle and left it there, and a short while afterwards he returned there. When I checked on him he was coughing a bit but otherwise all right, so I left him there for the night.
On Wednesday I went down to visit him several times. He had pain in swallowing, apparently due to a sore throat. At 1:30 PM on Wednesday he was not in the cubicle, but I saw him off defecating in the second garden (on the edge of some snow that was melting). I called to him and he meowed pitifully, and within a couple of minutes had made his way back to the main garden gate. He climbed over the gate, ignored me, and went back into that cubicle via a small, window-like slit in the doorway. Since he wanted to remain there, I set him up with honey-water (for his throat and for energy), whole milk (I had bought some during Roberto’s illness but only Stanislao had enjoyed drinking it, and it did him no harm), and a tiny dish with bits of his favorite foods. I saw that inside the cubicle-room he had been vomiting a yellowish-green substance (bile, I later realized), and defecating something of a similar color. He even vomited a bit at the doorway while I was setting up his food and drink.
On Thursday he was still there. I saw that he was sluggish, and hated to climb out of the box. Eventually I turned the box on its side – so that he could see at all times the dishes of food and drink that were nearby – and put an extra rag or two inside for him. In the evening I found that the cardboard box was soaked because he had been vomiting and defecating in the box. His underside was filthy, and his private parts were quite sore. So at 10:30 PM I carried him home in the box, and set up for him a clean covered nest in my hallway after cleaning the hallway and my bedroom. While the bedroom door was open he snuck away and hid under my bed, where, in fact, I had found him hiding in play just a few days earlier. So I set up a place for him there, instead.
During the night he moved around, defecating here and there, but drinking voluntarily honey-water, regular water, and milk. (Often I brought the dish to where he was lying, but if I didn’t then he got up and went to it, sometimes stepping in and overturning whatever dish was between him and the dish he wanted.) In the middle of the night he snuck out into the hallway and took up a place on my inside welcome mat, so I left him there. He came back into the bedroom about an hour later, shivering, and perched himself in front of the electric space heater. Eventually he settled back on his bedcloth near the space heater, and I covered him again.
On Friday the sore throat began to go away, and he had already stopped coughing or vomiting. But he still wouldn’t touch solid food, though he seemed interested in it. There was also a strange symptom: when he needed to walk he began walking with his right-front paw bent at the wrist, essentially walking on the back of the wrist, as though there were a sore or infection in the pad of his paw. (There was none.) During this second night he moved away from his bed area to a spot under the bed, and once for a few seconds he seemed to be in a hacking or choking agony before he coughed up a little bit of a clearish fluid. After that he took up a position under the bed next to the wall, but he needed to lean against the bedpost to keep upright on his elbow because he did not have the strength to keep his left elbow under him, and it kept slipping out to the left side, leaving him semi-prone. He wanted to stay there for a while, and since I could not place any cloth under him I placed one over him to keep him warm. During the night he returned to his normal bed-place, and I covered him there.
On Saturday all of his symptoms were gone – except that his voice was now hoarse – but he was still becoming weaker. At one point I found him on his side on top of his bedcloth with his belly exposed, on his way back from a toilet trip into the corner. (His stools were liquid until the end, originally viscous and of bile-like color, later less viscous and closer to yellow urine. His nose, incidentally, was dry until the end.) I took care of him all day long, making sure he drank regularly, but he continued to lose energy and had more and more difficulty in standing and walking, and more and more he was defecating where he lay, perhaps getting up to move a couple of inches after he had finished. Nevertheless the problem with the paw seemed to have passed, at least mostly, so I thought that perhaps the paw had merely been “asleep” due to him resting on it.
By 7:00 PM on Saturday night I realized that he was probably dying, but with no clear symptoms. Over the next two hours he remained comfortable, but his breath gradually became weaker. He could no longer keep his arms under him, so he was on his belly with his arms splayed out to the sides (on top of a thick cloth to keep him from the cold tiles). But he was still aware of me, still enjoyed being petted, and still drank a little honey-water. A couple of times he moved his head and neck strongly to one side, as though he were have an unpleasant spasm of some kind.
As his chin was resting on the floor I put a small cloth under each side of his jaw to keep his air passage from becoming obstructed, and about an hour before the end I turned him on his side. His breath became weaker and weaker, at times somewhat erratic, and at about 9:00 PM he became unaware of me. From 9:30 his breath continued becoming weaker and weaker until it could no longer be heard. I watched his chest move up and down until about 9:50 PM, though one small section of it, under his left elbow, continued slowly rising and following in an almost microscopic way for another five minutes or so after that. Then it was clear he was dead.
The next day, Sunday, at midday I was making preparations to take Stanislao off for burial when I noticed that his brother Luigi – the last one remaining from the 5 kittens that Bianca gave birth to in February/March 2012, and my dearest friend in this world, the first one to let me cuddle him – was ill. He had been fine the day before, and every day he had been spending the day outside with his cousins, sleeping in the sunshine in the second garden, and sleeping with them at night. But on Saturday night he had instead climbed up and slept in a box on top of the table, and is now spending more time on top of the table than under it.
I noticed that Luigi would not accept food, and I am not sure exactly how long he had been going without eating (perhaps 1 day or more) because I had been terribly busy caring for Stanislao and doing the endless washing (there are no dryers here in Italy and it has rained every day, so I have had to use all the rags I had) and bleaching, and in addition I had kept up a strict quarantine, allowing no contact between the area of Stanislao – my bedroom and the hallway – and the area of the others, the kitchen. And I washed my hands anytime I entered or left the kitchen.
When I was taking Stanislao for burial yesterday at 3:00 PM Luigi and his cousin Paolo saw him while he was lying dead on the front doorstep. On other occasions seeing their siblings/cousins dead had not bothered them at all, but by the evening it was clear to me that Luigi too was dying, and I began to suspect that he might be dying of loneliness for the loss of all his brothers, even though since the disappearance a month earlier of Roberto (who loved him dearly, and never left his side) he had been enjoying himself with his cousins quite well.
Yesterday Luigi was coughing a little bit, refusing to eat, he had difficulty or pain in swallowing, his nose was wet and a bit dirty, and he had little energy or interest, though he did love being cuddled. At about 5:00 PM he walked weakly outside to defecate, and when he came back in I saw that the upper part of his tail was dirty, because he had not had the strength (or care) to keep his tail raised while defecating. (Cleaning the private parts and the tail is something that I had to do last October for the little kitten who was originally blind, then a few days later for her cousin Andrea who was dying of acute renal failure, and then for Stanislao. But I don’t remember having to do it for Roberto. Throughout the time of his cold/flu Roberto slept in his box in the corner – with his brothers – but always came out to defecate elsewhere in the kitchen.)
All in all Luigi’s symptoms did not seem serious, but I was fairly certain that he was dying. It seemed to me that there must be something among these cats – either something in the garden that enters into all of the kittens while they are young or something congenital in the two families of Grigia and Bianca (but not Arancione) – that predisposes them to lose all their energy and rapidly waste away to death whenever they have any slight illness. In fact it seems that in every case – except for Andrea with the renal failure – I end up combating and defeating all the symptoms of a minor illness, only to have them waste away to death on the day following.
Luigi did not die last night. Today he has been resting most of the day. He sneezed a few times at midday, and has urinated in his bed a couple of times. Each time he does so he moves himself slightly. A while ago I noticed that his nose was no longer wet. This morning he had no interest at all in honey-water, looking away in disdain, but this afternoon he has been drinking it eagerly. (I was very worried, since he had touched no liquid in at least 6 hours.) Nevertheless I was horrified, about three hours ago, to see him adjusting his position and moving a few steps with one paw bent to the wrist, just as Stanislao had done on Friday. I am hoping that it just means that the paw was “asleep” from his having slept on top of it.
Luigi is comfortable now, with a little pillow under his chin. One symptom that has developed over the last several hours is that his breathing has become heavy and audible, close to wheezing, and he is now moving his head forward and backward a bit with every breath.
All in all Luigi seems to have nothing particularly serious at the moment, but I suspect that he will probably die tomorrow or Wednesday all the same. And I have no money at all to take this dear “feral” cat on a trip to the closest veterinarian.
The above is the entire medical history of this clan. This morning I was coming to the conclusion that the five offspring of Bianca must have some congenital illness – or curse – that those of Arancione do not have. (Of the latter, one disappeared suddenly while in good health, and one got hit by a car while crossing the road, but the other three are alive and while and on Saturday were playing with Luigi as always. Luigi passed last night with his head resting on the back of one of them.)
They seem to be dying of very slight illnesses, dying even after most of the symptoms have passed, as though they were 90-year-old humans instead of 11-month-old cats. I mentioned this today to someone in the village here who has cats, and he asked me, “Did their mother perhaps abandon them while they were young? If she detected that they were doomed to die then she would abandon them.”
In fact last June or July I had noticed that Bianca would return to the garden gate every night, and would call out loudly about 10 times, and all of her kittens (then 3-5 months old) would climb over the gate and come running out to meet her. But when the first of them reached Bianca she would invariably lash out at it with her claw. And since then she has spent very little time in the area, and although both her offspring and those of Arancione’s do run in her direction nowadays when she arrives and starts meowing loudly, she simply ignores them, eats some of the food from the woman, and leaves. The woman and I had assumed that Bianca had somehow become insane or crazy.
I have read online that a mother cat will abandon a newborn cat or an entire litter if she detects that it is defective or unhealthy. I know that I saw Bianca and her mother Arancione nursing kittens together in about April or May, but I do not recall if the kittens that Bianca was nursing were her own or her mother’s. So it is certain that Bianca has been avoiding her kittens since June/July, when they were 3-5 months old, and perhaps was not nursing them even earlier. But I am certain that Bianca gave birth to her kittens in February/March, about a month before her mother gave birth, so it must have been Bianca herself nursing them for at least the first month.
So I am wondering the following:
1. Does it happen that a mother will abandon an entire litter even after the first month?
2. If she does abandon them, is it possible that they would begin to die off for slight causes at about 10 months of age?
3. If the first two above are true, then is there any hope for Luigi, or is he certainly doomed to die very young?
Thank you very much for your help and for reading all this.
I live in a tiny, isolated village in the mountains of southern Italy.
Below my apartment balcony, across the lane from me, is the backyard of one house, which is connected to four other backyards or gardens. It is all fenced, so dogs cannot get in, but cats can. Several years ago an abandoned female cat entered there and began having kittens. A woman who loves animals but is too squeamish to allow them near her began feeding them regularly. In the spring and summer the abandoned female gives birth to kittens, but because there are no covered areas around these houses or gardens, in the fall and winter most of the kittens die.
In February 2012 there were living in the garden the original female (“Arancione” - Orange) and two adult daughters of hers (“Bianca” – White, and “Grigia” – Grey). In late February one of the daughters, Bianca, gave birth to about five kittens, apparently all males. A month later, her mother gave birth to about five kittens, probably three females and two males. Bianca and her mother, Arancione, nursed the kittens together, indiscriminately (or at least so it seemed). In late July the other daughter cat, Grigia, gave birth to six kittens. So starting from 3 cats in February the population exploded to 19 cats by the end of July, all of them feral and terrified of being approached.
The three broods of kittens spent most of their time growing up in the small, backyard garden of the woman who gives them the food. But of the 5 interconnected yards or gardens hers is the lowest, dampest, and coldest (lots of mosquitoes), and because it is shaded by the woman’s house the sun does not reach it for about 6 months of the year.
In late September the woman let various people come to try to take some of the 6 smallest feral kittens – those born in late July – but they merely scared them and did not succeed in catching any of them. Eventually one boy came and chased the kittens around the garden for 30-45 minutes before succeeding in catching one who was blind due to infections in both eyes. This episode traumatized all 6 of them and their mother: the mother vanished – presumably to look for her lost kitten – and we heard later that she was hit by a car and died slowly and terribly. At that point it was early October, and the weather turned cooler and rainier, and without shelter and a mother the youngest kittens began dying one after another. (At that time all 16 of the kittens were weaned, and ate from the woman in the company of their mothers.)
In early October I saw one of these youngest kittens that was wandering around blind, with both eyes closed by infections, unable to descend the staircase down to the place where the woman throws the food. Rather than let it die of hunger in the cold, I brought it home and nursed it. When I brought her home (about 7-8 weeks old) she was a skeleton, with nothing between her ribs, and her face was encrusted with dirt and feces because none of the other cats was licking her but all of them shunned her (she smelled awful). But by feeding her well and washing her eyes and face 3-4 times a day with chamomile tea I was able to bring her back to health: on the 6th day one of her eyes opened, and on the 8th day the other eye opened. On the 9th day I talked to someone who was interested in adopting her, but that evening she suddenly collapsed: I found her prone, with the contents of her digestive tract in a pool around her, and her body empty and limp like a bag. I tried to warm her, but she soon began having little spasms or gasps every 12 seconds, and died that way after about 45 minutes.
During the same week, two of her 4 siblings remaining in the garden also died, without any symptoms. (The woman had put out some cardboard boxes for the cats to sleep in, and the smallest kittens slept surrounded by the larger kittens or cats, but the boxes all got soggy in the rain and collapsed.) A few days after the sudden death of my formerly blind kitten, I succeeded in capturing her last two remaining siblings from the garden and taking them to a man on the edge of village who has some land with sunshine, covered places, a chicken coop, an adult cat, and two kittens perhaps two weeks older than these two (who were then about 8-9 weeks old).
The two kittens that I took him were both alive and well: one of them had been a bit sluggish in the garden the day previously, but the other was the biggest and strongest of the 6, and at night he would go out with the larger kittens (then 7-8 months old) and travel around the corner and come up into my apartment, where he would roam around with the others and go out onto my balcony to look down over the garden.
Of the two kittens that I took down to that man (out of an original litter of 6), the one that had been sluggish the day before died the second night – with no symptoms but simply a lack of energy – and the other, the strongest of the litter, died a few days later, as did both of the healthy kittens that the man already owned. And I subsequently learned that the boy who had come in late September and taken away that one (blind) kitten had taken it up to their farmyard up in the mountains, leaving it to sleep in the cold among sheep and dogs, and it died very soon. So in the space of about 23-24 days, Grigia and all 6 of her kittens were dead.
In the meantime, in mid-October one of the (female) kittens from the original female stray, Arancione, vanished and we presumed here dead. Subsequently one of her brothers got hit in the head by a car and died instantly. But the remaining three kittens from this brood of 5 born in late March or early April are alive and quite well.
I am writing to ask your help about the adolescent kittens of the remaining cat, Bianca. She was the first to have her kittens, having probably five males in late February or early March. When her mother, Arancione, gave birth to a brood a month later the two mothers shared the feeding of the kittens. In June the woman asked my help in making the kittens (10 at that time) more approachable, so that we would be able to give them away to people as pets. I set to work, and by devoting some time every day I was able to establish contact in late June with several of the kittens of Bianca. One became very cuddly and friendly early on – and at this moment he lies dying in my kitchen without apparent symptoms – one was initially very difficult but after much effort became friendly, one was very shy but would let me pet him if I snuck up on him from behind, one was extremely shy, and one was independent and never came near me.
In early October the one who was independent began roaming farther afield and not coming to the feeding sessions – either the woman’s in the morning or early afternoon or mine in the late evening. (About the same time, as I mentioned, one of the females of that other daughter cat suddenly vanished.) Then, as I mentioned above, the tiny kittens of the last daughter cat (Grigia) began dying one after the other.
In the midst of this, that kitten of Bianca’s that would let me pet him if I snuck up from behind – named “Andrea” (Andrew) and then about 7-8 months old – stopped eating: he would come out with the others to my feeding sessions, but he would not come near the food. I tried everything. For the next week or so he continued to move about during the day, but spent the nights in a cardboard box that he found in a hidden little cubicle under the woman’s house. By October 10 it was clear that he was deteriorating: he would drink copiously, and vomit a clear fluid, but eat nothing. On the day after my formerly blind kitten died, I grabbed this adolescent kitten who would not eat – I called him “Andrea” (Andrew) – and brought him around the corner up to my ground-floor apartment. But he immediately began roaming about anxiously and meowing pitifully, desperate to leave, so I opened the door and let him go. (This was not his first time in my apartment, because since July or August he sometimes accompanied his siblings when I led them around the corner to my apartment door by dropping pieces of ham along the way.)
The next day I saw him on a windowsill next to that cubicle, shivering and looking much worse, so I grabbed him again and brought him home with me so that at least he would not die in the cold alone. I set up for him a nice, sheltered nest in a box in my bedroom, but he preferred to hide under my bed. So I put some clean rags under him – the floor tiles are rather cold in October – and when I saw that he was trembling I put a shirt over him and placed a space heater nearby.
That was in the early afternoon. On the next day he seemed to be doing better. He had stopped trembling and vomiting, and instead of trying to “sleep” while erect on his front paws he had relaxed down onto his elbows, and eventually felt comfortable enough to curl up for some deep sleep. But he still wasn’t eating, and he had even stopped drinking, and when I pinched the back of his neck I saw that he was extremely dehydrated. Because I was penniless and had no money or transportation to take this stray kitten to the nearest veterinarian in another town about a half hour from here, I followed some instructions that I found online and began administering to him a few times per hour – in the mouth via syringe – a solution of water with honey and a little salt and baking soda. He accepted that well at first, but he continued to become dehydrated every time he urinated.
On the evening of the second day a couple of his brothers and cousins came up to the apartment, so I let them mix with him to cheer him up. But he had no interest in being with them, and instead became agitated and began trying to climb up the doors in order to go outside. He was full of energy, but frantically desperate to leave. In the end I compromised, taking him in my arms for a brief, 3-minute walk down to the garden (the area he was familiar with) and back. During that time he defecated in my arms, and began shivering again, so his desire to go outside passed quickly.
That evening I continued to watch over him in my bedroom, moving the space heater closer or farther away depending on what he seemed to want. But at about 10:00 PM he began to look rigid and hunched up again, and I discovered that he was dehydrated again. I cursed myself for putting the space heater too close to him and pointing it at his face instead of at his side, and I increased again my oral administrations of honey solution. But he began resisting the syringe, becoming rather violent. In addition, I noticed that he was urinating closer and closer to the time that I gave him water by syringe. After midnight he became restive, and began staggering about a bit, slumping against the wall, urinating where he sat, and so on. In the end, by 2:00 AM I realized that his body was not retaining fluids at all, that it had gotten to the point that water I gave him in the mouth by syringe was coming out the other end in something like 30 seconds.
Searching around online, I discovered that lack of fluid retention – as well as distaste for solid food, compulsive water drinking, and shivering – is a symptom of acute kidney failure. Essentially his kidneys were shot, completely destroyed. The only way to save him would be dialysis, for months or years. I sorrowfully broke the news to him at 2:20 A.M., and he rapidly deteriorated, lying prone, and passed away about 45 minutes later.
About a week later, that brother of his who was more independent, and who early on had stopped coming to our feeding sessions, reappeared in the garden. He was showing all of the same symptoms as his recently-dead brother Andrea: compulsive drinking of water, sluggishness, sunken eyes, disinterest in food. He vanished, and presumably died.
In late October, as I mentioned, one of the March-April kittens of the original stray cat (Arancione) got hit by a car and died instantly. But his 3 remaining siblings (2 sisters, 1 brother) are alive and very well, and spend every night in my kitchen.
In short, of the five kittens born to Bianca in February-March, two of them died of acute kidney failure, but the remaining three were fine for three months through mid-January. Then about a month ago one of them – Roberto, the one who initially had been difficult but later allowed me to touch him and even became my closest friend, always running alongside me with leaps and bounds whenever I went out – became sick with a cold or flu. On a Saturday his nose began running and he was sneezing, and he stopped eating solid food, on Sunday he was very much under the weather, and on Monday and Tuesday I took care of him intensively, keeping him covered and giving him honey-water and a little milk.
I was worried that he might not survive, but by Wednesday morning he seemed to be recovering, and at 10:00 in the morning he insisted in climbing – rather awkwardly and feebly – up to the kitchen window and going outside. I accompanied him down to the corner, where he entered into one of the gardens. Later on I caught sight of him again from my balcony, and I saw him in his usual place – lying down in the sun in the second of the five gardens. But then a rainstorm came, and I went down to look for him, and at about 2:00 PM I found him wisely taking shelter under the staircase down to the woman’s garden, so I took him in my arms – with much resistance since it was the first time ever – and carried him back up to my kitchen.
The next day, Thursday, although I had kept the kitchen window almost completely closed he somehow succeeded in climbing up and slipping through, and I could not catch him before he vanished around a corner in the midst of a torrential rainstorm. (Around that corner is an abandoned storeroom where the family of cats – 6 at that time – liked to spend their days or nights if the weather was bad, sleeping all in one heap.) He evaded the rainstorm by remaining close to the house with its overhanging eaves.
At 5:15 PM that day I caught sight of him again from my balcony. It was getting dark, and he was at the tiny public fountain installed below my balcony and across from the gate to the woman’s garden. I went down, grabbed him, and brought him home. He was feeling better: his nose was still dripping but no longer covered with mucus, it did not hurt him when I wiped it, and he enjoyed having me stroke his stomach. At 6:00 PM I had to go out for some errands, but because all of his 5 siblings/cousins were already in the kitchen or on the windowsill, and because he never went out in the evenings, I left the window open. When I came back at 7:00 PM all 6 of the cats had vanished. I had covered him with a cloth, and I found the cloth midway between the kitchen table (under which he and his siblings/cousins liked to sleep together) and the window. Two of his siblings/cousins came back later that evening, and the other three came back in the morning, but I never saw poor Roberto again. I hunted for him and called for him everywhere that evening, and during the night it snowed a couple inches. I looked for him everywhere for the next two days, checking every hole and ditch and window in the village, but I never found any trace of him, and the garbage collectors did not pick up any dead cats either.
I do not think Roberto “went away” when he thought death was near, because 1) he was improving, and all of the symptoms of his cold were passing, and 2) cats who hide when they are sick go into low, dark, hidden, cool places, and during his cold he had gone into such a place in my kitchen, but on Wednesday and Thursday when I saw him outside he was in very open, exposed places.
Roberto vanished on Thursday, January 17. That left behind two brothers of his from among the five born in February-March to Bianca, and three adolescent kittens from the March-April litter of Arancione. (Although I list them separately, the two sets of siblings act as a single, loving family, spending all of their time together.)
On Monday of last week one of the two remaining adolescent kittens of Bianca began coughing. I call him Stanislao (Stanislaw), and he was always extremely timid and afraid of me, but because he always slept with Roberto (as did the others), during Roberto’s sickness when I would reach back into their box to pet Roberto I would also touch Stanislao, and he came to like it. By last week he had become extremely cuddly, and enjoyed having me rub his stomach, but only if I snuck up on him from behind or began petting him while he was reposing with another cat.
Stanislao’s nose remained dry all along, so it was not a cold or flu. On Tuesday morning he went out with his other 4 siblings/cousins, but in the evening did not return. I went out to look for him, and at about midnight I found him in that cardboard box in the cubicle under the woman’s house, the place where his brother Andrea had spent his last days with worsening renal failure before I brought him home in mid-October to let him die in my home. I picked up Stanislao in the box and carried him up to my apartment. He meowed pitifully several times along the way, but I tried to reassure him. When I put the box down in the middle of the kitchen floor, where his siblings/cousins were milling around playing and feeding, he immediately jumped out of the box, climbed out, and fled through the kitchen window. I carried the box back down to the cubicle and left it there, and a short while afterwards he returned there. When I checked on him he was coughing a bit but otherwise all right, so I left him there for the night.
On Wednesday I went down to visit him several times. He had pain in swallowing, apparently due to a sore throat. At 1:30 PM on Wednesday he was not in the cubicle, but I saw him off defecating in the second garden (on the edge of some snow that was melting). I called to him and he meowed pitifully, and within a couple of minutes had made his way back to the main garden gate. He climbed over the gate, ignored me, and went back into that cubicle via a small, window-like slit in the doorway. Since he wanted to remain there, I set him up with honey-water (for his throat and for energy), whole milk (I had bought some during Roberto’s illness but only Stanislao had enjoyed drinking it, and it did him no harm), and a tiny dish with bits of his favorite foods. I saw that inside the cubicle-room he had been vomiting a yellowish-green substance (bile, I later realized), and defecating something of a similar color. He even vomited a bit at the doorway while I was setting up his food and drink.
On Thursday he was still there. I saw that he was sluggish, and hated to climb out of the box. Eventually I turned the box on its side – so that he could see at all times the dishes of food and drink that were nearby – and put an extra rag or two inside for him. In the evening I found that the cardboard box was soaked because he had been vomiting and defecating in the box. His underside was filthy, and his private parts were quite sore. So at 10:30 PM I carried him home in the box, and set up for him a clean covered nest in my hallway after cleaning the hallway and my bedroom. While the bedroom door was open he snuck away and hid under my bed, where, in fact, I had found him hiding in play just a few days earlier. So I set up a place for him there, instead.
During the night he moved around, defecating here and there, but drinking voluntarily honey-water, regular water, and milk. (Often I brought the dish to where he was lying, but if I didn’t then he got up and went to it, sometimes stepping in and overturning whatever dish was between him and the dish he wanted.) In the middle of the night he snuck out into the hallway and took up a place on my inside welcome mat, so I left him there. He came back into the bedroom about an hour later, shivering, and perched himself in front of the electric space heater. Eventually he settled back on his bedcloth near the space heater, and I covered him again.
On Friday the sore throat began to go away, and he had already stopped coughing or vomiting. But he still wouldn’t touch solid food, though he seemed interested in it. There was also a strange symptom: when he needed to walk he began walking with his right-front paw bent at the wrist, essentially walking on the back of the wrist, as though there were a sore or infection in the pad of his paw. (There was none.) During this second night he moved away from his bed area to a spot under the bed, and once for a few seconds he seemed to be in a hacking or choking agony before he coughed up a little bit of a clearish fluid. After that he took up a position under the bed next to the wall, but he needed to lean against the bedpost to keep upright on his elbow because he did not have the strength to keep his left elbow under him, and it kept slipping out to the left side, leaving him semi-prone. He wanted to stay there for a while, and since I could not place any cloth under him I placed one over him to keep him warm. During the night he returned to his normal bed-place, and I covered him there.
On Saturday all of his symptoms were gone – except that his voice was now hoarse – but he was still becoming weaker. At one point I found him on his side on top of his bedcloth with his belly exposed, on his way back from a toilet trip into the corner. (His stools were liquid until the end, originally viscous and of bile-like color, later less viscous and closer to yellow urine. His nose, incidentally, was dry until the end.) I took care of him all day long, making sure he drank regularly, but he continued to lose energy and had more and more difficulty in standing and walking, and more and more he was defecating where he lay, perhaps getting up to move a couple of inches after he had finished. Nevertheless the problem with the paw seemed to have passed, at least mostly, so I thought that perhaps the paw had merely been “asleep” due to him resting on it.
By 7:00 PM on Saturday night I realized that he was probably dying, but with no clear symptoms. Over the next two hours he remained comfortable, but his breath gradually became weaker. He could no longer keep his arms under him, so he was on his belly with his arms splayed out to the sides (on top of a thick cloth to keep him from the cold tiles). But he was still aware of me, still enjoyed being petted, and still drank a little honey-water. A couple of times he moved his head and neck strongly to one side, as though he were have an unpleasant spasm of some kind.
As his chin was resting on the floor I put a small cloth under each side of his jaw to keep his air passage from becoming obstructed, and about an hour before the end I turned him on his side. His breath became weaker and weaker, at times somewhat erratic, and at about 9:00 PM he became unaware of me. From 9:30 his breath continued becoming weaker and weaker until it could no longer be heard. I watched his chest move up and down until about 9:50 PM, though one small section of it, under his left elbow, continued slowly rising and following in an almost microscopic way for another five minutes or so after that. Then it was clear he was dead.
The next day, Sunday, at midday I was making preparations to take Stanislao off for burial when I noticed that his brother Luigi – the last one remaining from the 5 kittens that Bianca gave birth to in February/March 2012, and my dearest friend in this world, the first one to let me cuddle him – was ill. He had been fine the day before, and every day he had been spending the day outside with his cousins, sleeping in the sunshine in the second garden, and sleeping with them at night. But on Saturday night he had instead climbed up and slept in a box on top of the table, and is now spending more time on top of the table than under it.
I noticed that Luigi would not accept food, and I am not sure exactly how long he had been going without eating (perhaps 1 day or more) because I had been terribly busy caring for Stanislao and doing the endless washing (there are no dryers here in Italy and it has rained every day, so I have had to use all the rags I had) and bleaching, and in addition I had kept up a strict quarantine, allowing no contact between the area of Stanislao – my bedroom and the hallway – and the area of the others, the kitchen. And I washed my hands anytime I entered or left the kitchen.
When I was taking Stanislao for burial yesterday at 3:00 PM Luigi and his cousin Paolo saw him while he was lying dead on the front doorstep. On other occasions seeing their siblings/cousins dead had not bothered them at all, but by the evening it was clear to me that Luigi too was dying, and I began to suspect that he might be dying of loneliness for the loss of all his brothers, even though since the disappearance a month earlier of Roberto (who loved him dearly, and never left his side) he had been enjoying himself with his cousins quite well.
Yesterday Luigi was coughing a little bit, refusing to eat, he had difficulty or pain in swallowing, his nose was wet and a bit dirty, and he had little energy or interest, though he did love being cuddled. At about 5:00 PM he walked weakly outside to defecate, and when he came back in I saw that the upper part of his tail was dirty, because he had not had the strength (or care) to keep his tail raised while defecating. (Cleaning the private parts and the tail is something that I had to do last October for the little kitten who was originally blind, then a few days later for her cousin Andrea who was dying of acute renal failure, and then for Stanislao. But I don’t remember having to do it for Roberto. Throughout the time of his cold/flu Roberto slept in his box in the corner – with his brothers – but always came out to defecate elsewhere in the kitchen.)
All in all Luigi’s symptoms did not seem serious, but I was fairly certain that he was dying. It seemed to me that there must be something among these cats – either something in the garden that enters into all of the kittens while they are young or something congenital in the two families of Grigia and Bianca (but not Arancione) – that predisposes them to lose all their energy and rapidly waste away to death whenever they have any slight illness. In fact it seems that in every case – except for Andrea with the renal failure – I end up combating and defeating all the symptoms of a minor illness, only to have them waste away to death on the day following.
Luigi did not die last night. Today he has been resting most of the day. He sneezed a few times at midday, and has urinated in his bed a couple of times. Each time he does so he moves himself slightly. A while ago I noticed that his nose was no longer wet. This morning he had no interest at all in honey-water, looking away in disdain, but this afternoon he has been drinking it eagerly. (I was very worried, since he had touched no liquid in at least 6 hours.) Nevertheless I was horrified, about three hours ago, to see him adjusting his position and moving a few steps with one paw bent to the wrist, just as Stanislao had done on Friday. I am hoping that it just means that the paw was “asleep” from his having slept on top of it.
Luigi is comfortable now, with a little pillow under his chin. One symptom that has developed over the last several hours is that his breathing has become heavy and audible, close to wheezing, and he is now moving his head forward and backward a bit with every breath.
All in all Luigi seems to have nothing particularly serious at the moment, but I suspect that he will probably die tomorrow or Wednesday all the same. And I have no money at all to take this dear “feral” cat on a trip to the closest veterinarian.
The above is the entire medical history of this clan. This morning I was coming to the conclusion that the five offspring of Bianca must have some congenital illness – or curse – that those of Arancione do not have. (Of the latter, one disappeared suddenly while in good health, and one got hit by a car while crossing the road, but the other three are alive and while and on Saturday were playing with Luigi as always. Luigi passed last night with his head resting on the back of one of them.)
They seem to be dying of very slight illnesses, dying even after most of the symptoms have passed, as though they were 90-year-old humans instead of 11-month-old cats. I mentioned this today to someone in the village here who has cats, and he asked me, “Did their mother perhaps abandon them while they were young? If she detected that they were doomed to die then she would abandon them.”
In fact last June or July I had noticed that Bianca would return to the garden gate every night, and would call out loudly about 10 times, and all of her kittens (then 3-5 months old) would climb over the gate and come running out to meet her. But when the first of them reached Bianca she would invariably lash out at it with her claw. And since then she has spent very little time in the area, and although both her offspring and those of Arancione’s do run in her direction nowadays when she arrives and starts meowing loudly, she simply ignores them, eats some of the food from the woman, and leaves. The woman and I had assumed that Bianca had somehow become insane or crazy.
I have read online that a mother cat will abandon a newborn cat or an entire litter if she detects that it is defective or unhealthy. I know that I saw Bianca and her mother Arancione nursing kittens together in about April or May, but I do not recall if the kittens that Bianca was nursing were her own or her mother’s. So it is certain that Bianca has been avoiding her kittens since June/July, when they were 3-5 months old, and perhaps was not nursing them even earlier. But I am certain that Bianca gave birth to her kittens in February/March, about a month before her mother gave birth, so it must have been Bianca herself nursing them for at least the first month.
So I am wondering the following:
1. Does it happen that a mother will abandon an entire litter even after the first month?
2. If she does abandon them, is it possible that they would begin to die off for slight causes at about 10 months of age?
3. If the first two above are true, then is there any hope for Luigi, or is he certainly doomed to die very young?
Thank you very much for your help and for reading all this.
. 
Rest in peace, Luigi 
