This one has animal death, guys. Think of this as the opposite of all those “shiny new kitten!” threads.
The day was pretty good: I got to sleep in, sewed a little, wrote a little, shaved my brother’s head (at his request), spent some time reading and tooling around on the Internet. Lazy Sunday.
And then I went out to do chores and things got bad. I do evening calf feedings, and usually it’s enjoyable: I go out, mix up milk replacer, get licked and bawled at, one of them tries to eat my shorts, and we end the night either full of milk (the calves) or covered in it (me). But lately, it’s been less than fun.
To start, a lot of the calves coming in have something wrong with their eyes. Their pupils are misshapen, so instead of being round, they’re like cats’ eyes. It worries me, but the vet says not to worry about it, they can see fine, and they’re healthy otherwise. But it still gives me pause, and I wish it wasn’t there.
On top of that, there’s some sort of outbreak of something among the calves on the farm. Over the past couple weeks, three or four have died. With three of them, they were fine for the morning feeding, and got sick some time during the day – fever, don’t want to eat, diarrhea, too weak to stand – and were dead by the next evening. (The fourth may have died from unrelated pneumonia. We haven’t gotten the cultures back yet.) It’s so quick you barely have time to treat them before BOOM. They’re dead.
So, tonight, the third (or fourth) calf died, and two more got sick. One of the ones that’s sick I don’t think is going to make it through the night, but the other one probably will, though who knows about tomorrow night. The vet is coming tomorrow, so we’ll know what to do . . . maybe. If he knows what to do.
Since that calf died and two more got sick tonight, that means I got to spend time sanitizing absolutely everything it might have touched with scalding water and bleach. No biggie, it had to be done. Then Dad told me that I had to help my brother finish up milking, because Dad had something he had to do. So I was down the barn for about three hours longer than I usually am, and it was well past dark by the time I was ready to leave.
There are five little roly-poly barn kittens that follow me down every night from the back porch to the barn, and then follow me up when I’m done with chores. There are two calicos, and a black and white tuxedo, a gray and white one with faint tiger stripes on the gray parts, and a little, funny orange and white one. The orange and white one is the run of the litter, and he’s about half the size of the other ones. They’re about ten weeks old, and they’re absolutely precious. Everybody loves them, and none of them have names because we can’t agree on any.
Because I was in the barn for so long, the kittens hadn’t gone up to the house to sleep under the porch like they usually do, so they were still roaming the barnyard. We were done with milking, so Dad started to back the truck up and I saw a little orange and white flash of fur under the truck. Before I could yell at Daddy to stop, the kitten ran under the wheel of the truck.
At first, I thought the truck just got his tail or one of his legs, because the kitten was running so fast. He ran into some weeds at the edge of the driveway and then just stopped. Dad, my brother, and I all ran over to him, and I crouched down to see if he was all right.
I told Dad that I thought one of the kitty’s legs was broken, and he’d probably be OK. Dad told me to “pick him up, just to be sure.” So I did, and it was obvious that he wasn’t going to be all right. It looked like maybe his intestines had burst and his back was broken.
I said, “Daddy, I don’t think he’s going to make it,” and my dad started to cry, which was almost as terrible as the incontrovertible fact that the kitten was going to die. (Just as an aside to all those people who think farmers don’t care about animals: They do. Oh god, they do. It’s nearly impossible to be in close contact with animals day after day without loving them on some level.)
Dad and my brother left at that point, and I don’t blame them. I stayed, petting the kitten until he slipped away. While I was petting him, he started to purr, and I lost it. Until then, I was thinking, “It was accident, and they happen, and I can’t fix this. I’ve just got to let him go.” But then he started to purr, and it was terrible.
I can handle calves dying, because it happens. They usually give you some warning. But kittens are different from calves. Calves don’t curl up in your lap and knead at your leg or chase flies or twine around your ankles. Kittens don’t weigh more than you do in two weeks on a liquid diet or knock you over into manure or mistake your hair for hay.
The worst part is that there was absolutely nothing I could do for the kitty to put him out of his misery. The nearest emergency vet clinic is over an hour away and the closest small animal vet is a half hour away and it’s Sunday night. The large animal vets sure as hell weren’t going to open up the clinic or make a call to euthanize a kitten. (The dog we had before this one had brain cancer, and the vet wouldn’t come to put him down when he went into his final decline. He told Dad to shoot the dog. We found a different vet.)
I feel like I have the touch of death, because all these calves are dying and I can’t stop it, and then my favorite kitten got run over. And I couldn’t help him. All I could was pet him until he stopped purring.
I’m so sorry. I’m glad you were strong enough to be there for the kitten at the end, though. I’m sure somewhere in his kitty mind, he was grateful to have a friend with him.