Dog was interested in the cat program..

Dog was interested in the cat program I was watching. She was listening, and finally decided to sleep by iPad with one ear twitching.

Anyway the program got to where related cats might help at the birth of each other's cats. But they seemed to think it was crucial there had to be this element of relatedness. Actually, this doesn't need to be so.

In the early 1970's I took in stray cats. They were not related. I did also have 3 of my own cats at the time.

One stray cat began to give birth to kittens and didn't know what to do. Neither did I. She didn't know she had to break the sac around the new kittens. For some reason the sac was not a thin membrane, but something very thick. I had seen a thin membrane round a kitten being born a few years before but it was broken as the kitten came out of the mother's birth canal. I couldn't break this thick sac not with my finger nails and I realized the kittens were going to drown in the amniotic fluid. Then fortunately one of my cats who had not yet had kittens stepped in and bit through the sacs and between her and me helping the kittens to breathe, the three new born kittens were fine.

About a year later I took in three stray cats, from different sources, which I found a short while later were each pregnant. Three cardboard boxes were prepared. On Monday the smallest mother cat had 8 kittens. On Wednesday one has 5 kittens and on the Friday the largest cat had 3 kittens. The largest cat seemed a bit clueless so Wednesday's mother and Monday's mother helped deliver her kittens.

On Saturday morning I got up and looked in the first cardboard box and I panicked. No kittens. The second cardboard box had no kittens either. My stomach was churning. But in the last cardboard box was Monday's mother cat with all 16 kittens. I had to pick them out of the box to count them just to check. The other two mother cats had gone out hunting. So at some point while I had been asleep the Friday night, the three mother cats had decided to pool resources and moved all the kittens to one box with one one of the three mother cats always in attendance. These kittens were never left on their own. And the surprising thing to me was all the kittens were very contented. There were always enough teats to go round for kittens that wanted to feed and the rest slept. Curiously these kittens were very advanced for their age once they ventured out of their cardboard box and began to play...

I did find homes for them all.

Many years later I had one of my cats who had kittens. I kept one of the kittens and a year or so later she had her own kittens. The mother was in attendance of her daughter and she cleaned her daughter's kittens as they were being born. I took photographs...I had a camera at this time. The photographs of this will be in the garage somewhere. I cannot remember if there were 6 or 8 kittens but the photos will show when I find them. But that is not the end of that story. I had a dog, Truffle, and when the cat left her kittens in the box (which was in my son's bedroom) Truffle (who had been spayed so never had puppies) unknown to us had taken the kittens one by one out of the box (an old ottoman) and put them on my son's bed and was 'nursing' them and they were snuggled up to the dog sleeping when I found them. The mother cat came in at the some point, boxed the dog over her ears and carried the kittens one by one back to the box.

But as soon as the mother cat left the kittens again, Truffle took them out of the ottoman and put them back on my son's bed...and so this went on and on and on....My son would wake up on the night to find he was sharing his bed with Truffle and all the kittens.

It was some time before I actually saw the dog carry the kittens and my heart was in my mouth. I thought the dog was going to swallow the kitten, but she never did.

I will have to find the photos...