On the Misery of Helplessness

[serinde]

Piewacket has taken against her kittens. She has ignored them for the last ~18 hours, and hisses when they come near her. I tried bottle-feeding them, but although I know they're hungry--they crawl all over me and root against every bit of warm skin they encounter--they don't seem able to grasp the whole bottle concept. Five helpless little tiny bundles of fluff frantically crying and crawling on you, fighting to live, and you can't do anything for them; that's slit-your-wrists territory there.

Comments

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Ish. It seems to happen, AIUI, if the mother feels insecure or gets frightened off the nest. (Or is just way too young to know what she is about, which was our best guess for why Foxy abandoned Rollo et al.) The frightened option is unlikely to be true, since Piewacket has been terrorizing every other cat in a two block radius; but we wonder whether the density of cats is triggering some kind of nature's population control impulse. No idea.