at least i *think* they\'re kittens.. well, this isn\'t a fun story..
here\'s a crappy picture of orange/white kitty that i took on my cell phone one morning around 4:30am back in november, when i saw this cat for the first time on our back deck:
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i\'m now assuming this cat is a female, and we\'ve only seen \'her\' a few times since then. don\'t know if she\'s a stray or if she belongs to someone..
well, around 6:00 last night, i\'m running tyson out back right before lisa and i head out to dinner for our anniversary. as i\'m walking out, i notice this cat sitting up top of our back yard, in front of a tree.. as tyson and i walk down the steps, the cat just stays there - doesn\'t even flinch, even with tyson eyeballing him.. as we get a little closer (but still pretty far), tyson is being cautious, but then decides he wants to (try to) run after the cat. as he starts into his motion, the cat then gets scared and runs under the fence into the neighbor\'s yard, as i pull tyson back..
so tyson\'s all concerned about the foreign animal in his yard so he wants to go up and sniff around.. as we get up towards the top near the tree, i look down, and see what looks to be a tiny dead newborn (possibly premature?) kitten.
i also saw limbs/parts of another one right next to the tree, where orange/white kitty was camped out. i managed to back up a bit with tyson before he noticed it, and i brought him back inside.
i told lisa about it and had her go out and take a look while i grabbed my camera and cleanup materials. when she went up to check it out, she also found 2 more dead kittens scattered in the area (all 3 were in about an 8-foot radius).
not sure when this all happened. this was around 6pm, and tyson had last been out around 4 hours earlier (and orange/white kitty was not there at that time). i *assume* he would have sniffed them out at that time if they were there. they were covered with flies, so i don\'t know how long they\'d been there for. i don\'t know if they were born dead or born without a chance (it was close to 100° yesterday, with very high humidity and a \'heat index\' of about 110°). we looked around the yard for more, but there were just the 3 of them, plus what we assume was an undeveloped 4th (there were just limbs and one other unidentifiable part - no evidence to suggest a 4th kitten had been torn apart by something). i\'m also assuming that orange/white kitty is the mother, though we haven\'t seen her back there since we took the kittens away. not sure if she had more kittens elsewhere..
anyways, it was really sad, and caught us off-guard. we had no idea there was a preggo cat around, and like i said, we were on our way out to dinner.. i did take a few pictures of them, which may be disturbing, i\'m not sure.. anyways, click the links below if you want to see them.. i put my foot in one of the pics to give some sort of a size scale (like i said, i don\'t know if they were premature or not - maybe someone can tell), because they were VERY small.. very sad though.. wish there\'s something we could have done..
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