Furred Saviours

I think these little Slinky Malinky look-alikes have saved my children’s souls.
No more tears after teatime, no more wailing for Daddy when they curl in against me at night – no more demanding I come to bed with them at bedtime.
I still have pictures of ‘Dad’ bluetacked all through my house and the occasional ‘when’s Dad going to call – I miss him’, but, for the most times, between school and their furry little charges, they’re happily distracted.

Finding these little buggers wasn’t easy.
Which is ironic when there’s obviously hundreds of people not neutering their cats – but I refused to have a Tabby.
To me, a Tabby spells ‘feral’ – I just can’t escape that old prejudice.

After a tearful phone call with The Girl, my mother spent a whole day ringing every petshop and RSPCA between the Eyre Peninsula and the Flinders Ranges.
The RSPCA provided animals with all the appropriate shots and neutering, but their cats were mostly three-month-olds, and my babies needed babies of their own.
The local petshop was happy to sell me sad, scrawny, much-too-young-to-be-weaned little felines for $15 – but the poor things looked so sad and neglected I couldn’t do it.
It can only be serendipity that one of the local farmer mums brought in a basketload of kittens for show and tell at The Kids’ school, the same day I was bewailing the state of the petshop kittens to the school secretary.
Turns out, she’d had the all-black mum Licorice show up on her doorstep one night, and soon after came a whole litter of All-Sorts.
She leapt at the chance of knowing where her new babies were going to end up, a chance to soothe her own kitten-obsessed children, and I leapt at the chance of free, healthy, seven-week old kittens.

With the chookshed not finished yet, no fence (or inclination) to keep a dog in, guinea pigs just too damned fragile and rabbits one step too far for my moral sense – kittens seemed the obvious sollution!

Of course, the kids and I had been talking about kittens and chooks for a while now.
I’d made the mistake, last week, of chivvying them home from school with the promise of a ‘surprise’.
“Is it Daddy? Is it our cats? Are our chooks here?”
The answer – iced donuts – just didn’t seem so special afterwards.

Two days later I was doing the same thing, rushing them home with talk of a ‘surprise’.
“Is it donuts? Is it in the kitchen?”
In the car I’d teased them that it was ‘stinkin’ Tuna’ – to help them grow big and strong.
The look on The Girl’s face when I opened the fridge and brought out…Tuna!
The pair continued to look at me with verging-on-tears disbelief as I shoveled out Tuna chunks into a bowl, telling them how good it was for brains and bones.
“But we don’t LIKE stinkin’ Tuna,” The Girl wailed through wavering lips.
“Well I’ll give it to someone who does…” I declared.
It was worth it, to see their faces when the smell of the Tuna coaxed the little fluffballs out from under the TV cabinet.

Now they have spent two days creating little cat runs and cat palaces and cat toy piles and cat toys out of lolly wrappers and feathers and wool, and they have gone to bed looking at pictures of cats in the ‘Big Book of Egypt’.

I can tell you, with a clear conscience, that the sense of peace these little animals have brought my family is worth every butchered gecko or mauled parrot I ever have to claim responsibility for.