I have a couple of good scratches on my hand - it doesn't like anyone messing around the food, even if you're
giving it food. My dog had it 30 feet up a tree, and it cried like a baby and we talked it down with baby talk and kitty kibbles, my daughter and I. It let her carry it safely into the garage for a warm meal and some water. It was starving and cold, and let us pet it, even tried to purr, but it turns on a dime, dang scary! It's using the litterbox, hiding under hubby's work bench until the thaw. Hopefully, we'll be friends by then and I can put it in the carrier for neutering. But I fear it's too damaged from stress to thaw to anyone.
Too bad new kitty hates old kitty, the one I rescued a cold December years ago. You'd think they'd get along, with all that hard living and starvation and coyote running in common. Last year, I thought my neighbor's german shepard was crapping in my yard again and went out yelling and realized when I was too close that the giant red coyote was tracking a rabbit across my yard. I still can't believe how big it was, how little regard and no fear it had for me, and I hope now I have a big dog, it stays away. Between the foxes, coyotes, hawks and owls cramped on these little woods, life is tough for everyone, especially small furry mammals.
My first rescue kitty was a runner. A scrawny teen age mom ossie cat, she was amazing. The smartest feline I ever knew. She got trapped up a giant oak by jack russels a few years ago, before the coyotes likely got her, and she was front declawed and couldn't get down. So once the dogs were locked up, and I realized the roofing ladder was way too short, I tied a rope to a football and threw it over the branch, then raised a storage box up to Ossie, and she hopped right in. It was my most amazing pet rescue ever. She used to run away a lot, and stay with random strangers. We were always putting up and taking down missing posters. My neighbors kept a kitty bed for her and always called to tell me when she was there. One day she never came home and I prefer to imagine her adopted by kind strangers than food for the pack that was hunting the day before she disappeared.
That's her on the left, Ossie the runner; Noel who peed on my bed on the right.
Once something shows up, I take care of it, and love it. I rescue plants, bugs, moths, butterflies, it's a personality glitch, caring too much. But I always seem to get as much or more than I give, so that's good. Anyway, here's some of things I rescue. Any caterpillar gets protection, because the wasps and birds love to eat them. I feed the birds and don't care for the wasps. Every year I find and protect monarch and black swallowtail larva. They are so easy, and gratifying, I only have to wait a few weeks for them to change.
That's my beautiful girl, helping me release the monarchs. She's a rescuer too. In fact, every woman in my entire family can't not save something that needs saving.
The moths are a different story, a much sadder, stressful obsession. 90 percent of the eggs/larva usually don't make it. I have to wait a year to see if they survive winter and hatch, and I never know if the males I release find a mate, and my one female died with her hundreds of eggs barren, and I was so sad I cried. For a moth. They have no mouth, just huge eyes and beautiful wings and wait almost a year for their few days to mate and its heartbreaking. I want to start a save the moths foundation because they are disappearing and I'm completely obsessed.
Then there's the jade plants. I have to save every freaking leaf that falls off the decades old queen mum. This is a fraction of my rescues.
You get the gist. I have issues!
