Post by Trailpal on Jan 10, 2011 22:55:46 GMT -5
(Crush is the Orange and White, Tommy is inside the tub.)
Crush was born 5 years ago in our barn, over the weekend of Hurricane Katrina. His mom had him and two other kittens - she pretty much abandoned them at birth, carried one around but evidently did not feed it. We rescued the two boys, Crush and Dali before they were a day old and fed them kitten milk replacer for a few weeks until their auntie had her babies and she took them over.
Crush was one of our "Porch Cats". In the hierarchy of cats at our place, there were the "Studio Cats" (a couple of spayed females and one of their grown kittens, all spayed/neutered who came indoors to the studio at night), the "Porch Cats" (two neutered toms who lived mostly on the porch and had their own little "cat igloos"), and then the "Barn Cats". Crush spent more than a year as a barn cat, he was wary of us and aloof even though we had raised him and cuddled him. Eventually though, he decided we were ok and began hanging out on the porch, fighting the other cats and spraying, but making sweetie-sweetie to us. LOL we got him neutered and the fighting and most spraying (well at least the stinky part) stopped.
When we left Nebraska and our caretakers took over, life continued pretty much the same. He still lived on the porch and mugged everyone for hugs and pets. I saw him a few weeks ago when I was out for a visit, and he looked pretty happy. This morning, they found him in bad shape in the barn, shivering, limp, and unable to eat or drink. They warmed him up, but he seemed to be choking, gave a holler, and died. The poor little girls are pretty sad, but I suspect it was an aneurysm or maybe a clot and there wasn't much to be done.