The three lost kittens - a Grim furry tale with a happy ending

The wilderness bordering La Mata salt lake in the southern Costa Blanca is home to all sorts of wild life. The network of abandoned access roads makes it ideal territory for dog-walking at El Raso...and for inhuman humans who think it is acceptable to dump unwanted pets in the jungle of overgrowth.  


I hope the people responsible for leaving a mother cat and her three mottled white kittens in the bushes recently have some sort of conscience. I doubt they'll care that mum was too weak to survive, leaving her six-week-old triplets to fend for themselves.

Fortunately there is a happy ending to this particular furry tale, thanks to the handful of caring dog owners who left food and water which helped the tick-infested trio to stay alive. 

My friend Iola and her husband Mick were among residents who fed the kittens. When they told me about them last weekend, I called Christine Hoggett at Impact Charity. “If the poor things are left in this heat, they will certainly die,'' I was told. “We are really struggling for space, but we'll find room for them.''


So, armed with a rusting cat-trap and my caring friends, I paid a couple of visits to the El Raso jungle over the weekend. By Sunday afternoon the three waifs, all girls, were safe in the hands of Christine, her son Andy and their team of carers  – and are now tick and infection free and purring happily
. 
Veterinary care and inoculations will follow and within weeks the triplets, pictured here following their rescue, will hopefully have permanent homes.

Many thanks to the caring dog owners of El Raso, particularly Iola, Mick, Susan and Simon, without whom the unprotected kittens would surely have perished. Also to Jackie Loosely for her help in catching and transporting the three waifs to Impact HQ in La Marina.

Feral kittens can be tamed in just one week...the living proof

The View newspaper, Torrevieja, Costa Blanca - June 19, 2015: I fell instantly in love with the five tiny pairs of eyes staring at me from the patio terrace, even if it was tantamount to experiencing ­Heaven and Hell at the same moment.

As the only local resident soft (or stupid) enough to feed the neighbourhood waifs and strays, I’ve been sitting for years on a potential Mog-otov Cocktail in the form of a feral population ­explosion outside my back door.

However, since the alternative would have been to lie awake each night feeling the hunger pains of starving cats, I felt I had no option.
Trapping and neutering the ferals has cost me a fortune in food and veterinary fees – and I’ve also missed out on a few holidays for fear of the menagerie going unfed. There’s no question of putting them in kennels since it’s virtually impossible to lay hands on them.

I’m told some animal charities have feral-cat programmes which include helping to catch adults and assisting with veterinary fees. If that’s true, all I can say is ….HELP!

Meanwhile, I apologise for any offence caused by the shameless behaviour of an exhibitionist mother-of-five on my patio. Multiple breast feeding is not permitted in full view of passers by – and certainly not when those involved are occupying rent-free accommodation.

A kitty of hope for my doorstep pussies galore 

The View newspaper, June 26, 2015: Christine Hoggett’s email was both music to my ears and an instant cure for mew-sickness.

“Most people agree that if you find street kittens and can trap them before they are 12 weeks old you can domesticate them,’’ wrote Chrisitne, who runs the Impact charity for cats and kittens in La Marina Urb+.

And there was silly old me believing I’d have to spend the rest of my life feeding the five baby moggies delivered to my back door by their feral mum three weeks ago.

I felt trapped, unable to resist the the demands of tiny eyes pleading for food, yet deeply concerned that if I continued to indulge them in Mercadona goodies, they would never learn the art of hunting out their own food.

And at the same time so fearful of human beings that there was no hope of them ever being adopted as family pets.
Now, in Christine’s response to my article last week, here was a glimmer of hope for my mini menagerie – and with it a chance to conduct a fascinating public experiment to prove her point about domesticating street kittens. By the time you read this, Christine will hopefully have trapped and collected the kittens, which I guess are eight or nine weeks old, and taken them to join Impact’s 72-strong community of moggies seeking homes.

I will pay their food bills and veterinary fees and also provide regular updates on their progress on this page. At the end of the experiment, the Famous Five will hopefully be not only irresistibly appealing, but also big enough celebrities to top the bill in the next series of Kitten’s Got Talent.

Next week I hope to publish photographs of the quintet in their new environment. Two are black, one black and white and two are blue-eyed tabbies. At present, it is only possible to stroke them while they ar eating but I now have real hope that, with Christine’s expert guidance, they will make perfect pets in due course.

Impact is a registered charity based and operates out of a tiny shop in La Marina. Christine tells me: “The urbanisation is pretty much free of feral cats as three years ago we ran a big campaign.

“The odd kitten(s) are still found but anything over 12 weeks old is pretty much near-impossible to ­domesticate as by that age they are independent and have there own routine.

“We have just registered as a protectora which gives us a wider scope. Legally you need to be a protectora to take animals off the streets. Spain is a dog country and with retired people moving here at a fast rate, they do prefer dogs to cats.’’

Christine, who moved to Spain in 1996 when her husband retired from the police force, added: “This kitten season has been huge. We are having dog charities contact us asking to take kittens. “In all honesty, if it was not for the PayPal donations from the British back home we would not be able to do what we do.

“And without the help of the local community and people in the surrounding areas donating their unwanted goods we would not be able to keep the charity shop open.

“It would be great if more talk was concentrated on kittens and cats in local papers but it seems it is all about dogs.’’

Meanwhile, Impact is giving a big discount for spaying cats. Says Christine: “If the vets started taking notice of how high their prices are and lowered them drastically, there would not be this huge problem with feral and unwanted kittens.

“To ask a member of the public to pay between €120 and €140 to spay a female cat is quite horrific. This is why people won’t use vets and let their cats breed.’’

My local vet does at least give me a 30 per cent discount – but I’m not expecting any thanks for forking out €200 last week to have two pregnant females and a straggly tom neutered.

The only benefit, a far as I can see, is that I won’t have two more litters of kittens delivered to my back door in the next couple of weeks. 

The View newspaper, July 3, 2015:  I call it Close Encounter of the Purred Kind – and I promise I’m not taking the puss. The voluntary exercise to domesticate six feral kittens brought to me by their proud mum got under way last Wednesday under the expert eye of Christine Hoggert.

Chris, who runs the Impact charity in La Marina, says wild kittens up to the age of 12 weeks can normally be domesticated. And the last few days seem to indicate this theory is largely true. During the three weeks they lived in and around my garden, all six kittens seemed petrified of human contact, and only allowed me to touch them while their heads were jammed into a food bowl.

I feared it would never be possible to pick any of them up, let alone give them a cuddle. Christine quickly discovered that this was not the case. This is how the first few days of the experiment went…

Wednesday June 24: In the roasting heat of a 34-degree afternoon, Christine, volunteer helper Jackie and I managed to trap four of the feral kittens – two black, one tabby and one black and white. Later in the day, I caged a second tabby, together with the mother, and took them to join the others at the Impact shop.

Thursday June 25: The kittens’ mum was taken to the vet for sterilisation and found to be two weeks into a new pregnancy. It was a timely intervention as the black-and-white female had been carrying two deformed kittens. Meanwhile, Christine and her team began to concentrate on the kittens. The initial prognosis was not encouraging. “I must admit they do look like they are beyond help,’’ reported Chris, “but this afternoon I caught them playing in their crate and that gives me even more motivation. If they are playing, then they have the domestic side in them. Our main aim tonight is to separate them and treat their eyes with Trobex. The two black kitties are considerably more friendly than the others.’’

Friday, June 26: Christine received a nasty bite from one of the tabbies as she attempted to clean its weepy eyes. “The bite was purely because her eyes are a mess and she can’t see out of them,’’ she reported. There was, however, ‘’great success’’ during the evening with one of the black kittens. ‘’He/she actually let me clean his/her eyes with Trobex, which is great to use on cats with bad eyes and costs only a couple of euros from the chemist.’’ Christine added: “We have managed to separate this cat from the others and have named him Reggie. His brothers are all eating fine, too.’’

Saturday, June 27: At 5am the kittens were already singing with all their lung power. “Reggie has pretty much turned now and can be picked up,’’ said Chris.’’He/she purrs away while being stroked and the best thing about it is that he/she is boss-eyed!’’

Sunday June 28: Now that the kittens are reasonably settled, it’s a process of taking them to the vet one by one. Whenever a feral cat is taken off the street, a blood test is performed for FELv. The great thing here is that Mummy cat was tested negative, which means the kittens would all be negative, too. Nevertheless they will all be tested when they are a little older.

Monday June 29: Reggie is doing great, though still a little nervy. He will be going for his first vaccination this week but there is great joy in in the camp with the way things have gone so far. The one kitten Christine’s team were a little afraid of – the black and white one – is at this moment running around playing with other kittens. Christine says it will be a slow process but she is confident it will work.

Tuesday June 30: All the kittens are now able to be handled. Obviously if something spooks them they run for cover but this is a big step. They are eating well and their eyes are clearing up, thanks to twice-a-day eye drops.

No pussyfooting about - they're tame after one week!

The View newspaper, July 10, 2015:  I headed off to the UK a fortnight ago happy in the knowledge that the latest additions to Casa Donna’s feline family were in safe hands. Even so, I had huge doubts as to whether Christine Hoggett and her Impact Charity volunteers could really convert the five sickly feral kittens into gentle, loving family pets.

So imagine the shock when, just six days after they had been trapped and taken to Impact HQ in La Marina, I received the following Mission Almost Accomplished message from Christine. "One week on from trapping the kittens and their mum, and everything has gone far better than we could have imagined,” she reported, reflecting on the settling-in period and successful spaying of Mum

“We can already say that Reggie, the black kitten we separated from the others early on, is ‘domesticated’. He still likes to have a nip at you when you play with him, but this is down to the fact he is still learning.

“The process over the coming weeks will be pretty much more of the same stuff – spending time with them, stroking them, eye cleaning. They are all touchable now and able to be handled.

“As these kittens have effectively come straight from the street we have to be careful how the vaccinations are done. They all showed signs of mild cat flu, runny noses, bad eyes and sneezing.

“Giving a kitten its first vaccination when it is like this can sometimes be lethal.

They all need to recover before vaccinations start.

“Reggie is free of all these symptoms. This boils down to us splitting him from his siblings in the first 48 hours.”

And there I was, convinced I’d return to Spain next week to find a cage full of snarling mini-moggies dumped in my overgrown garden behind a hastily-scrawled placard reading ‘Wild and Untrainable’.

How could I ever have doubted Christine’s assertion that feral kittens can become loving family pets with a little help from those who really care? OK, there is still a long way to go, but I’m now convinced the experiment will have a happy ending.

Whether it’s Impact or any other animal charity, just to know there are people out there who really care gives hope to every cat and dog lover in Spain. Particularly in an increasingly cash-strapped Spanish society where the dumping of unwanted pets is in danger of becoming a national pastime.

Say R...it's all about Rosie, Reggie and Ronnie now

The View newspaper, July 24, 2015:  Meet Rosie...the gentle living proof that feral kittens can not only be tamed, but also become gentle, loving pets. 
Four weeks ago, Rosie and four of her tiny siblings were adopted by the Impact Cats Charity after spending the first few weeks of their wretched lives in the overgrown garden of an empty El Raso house. 
Their mother, a very protective black and white feral, had reared them in the jungle next door to my home before bringing them cunningly to my back door at meal times.
The wide-eyed kittens were both fascinated and frightened by the two-legged monster that fed them, each day and it was only at meal times that I was allowed to get near enough to touch them. Stroking was taboo - their mother made sure of that by hissing every time I came too close for her comfort.
So when Impact’s Christine Hoggett heard of my little problem, she agreed to take part in an experiment to confirm that feral kittens can be domesticated as long as they are caught early enough.
It’s exactly one month since Chris, her volunteer friend Jackie and I began our mission by trapping all but one of the kittens, along with their Mum, and taking them to Impact HQ for assessment.
Mum was sterilised wthin 24 hours and Chris, her son Andrew and the Impact team then got to work on the two black, two tabby and lone black and white tots.
I returned from the UK last week  to see the impact of Impact for myself. In Rosie, the change was astounding. No longer was I faced by a frightened feral; here was a beautiful relaxed creature happy to sit on my lap and be stroked. Black boys Ronnie and Reggie (I wonder who they were named after?) had  also lost their aggressive streak and the whole entourage were clearly responding to treatment to cure minor ailments like weepy eyes.
Christine tells me: “Rosie should be ready for a home from the middle of August, as will Ronnie and Reggie.’’
Rosie’s identical twin and the black and white kitten are taking longer to adjust but Christine assures me the omens are good.
Last Friday, I managed to trap Charlie, Ronnie and Reggie’s black sibling, and took him to the Impact shop, where the petrified puss leapt up the window shutter and spent the next few hours hiding in the blind’s inner workings.
“We got Charlie down from the window about 8pm,’’ reported Christine later. “He was exhausted and at this very moment is asleep under a bed. 
“He has completely relaxed and calmed down and hopefully will also be ready for homing from mid August.’’ 

Impact Charity can be contacted on 634 330 135. There is also a dedicated PayPal for donations via mail@impactcharity.net
Reprinted from my weekly column in The View (www.theview.es)

Bizarre but true: The night my psychic dog gambled with her life

I love both cats and dogs – with a marginal preference for moggies. And that’s because they have cleaner habits than poo-ches, whose noses should be avoided at all costs because you know exactly where they have been.

Anything clean and healthy is not to be sniffed at as far as Fido and his pals are concerned. Far better to savour the pungent pong of canine excreta at any opportunity and then lick the residue lovingly into their owner's face.

Some dogs, however, are extra special. Like Carrie, who was my best friend for 15 years until I found her frozen body on the back doorstep of our home in Manchester one frosty winter morning. But more of that later.

Carrie was a small sandy mongrel with white markings – probably a whippet cross because she hared across the local park so rapidly that I swear she overtook herself half way across!

She was around two years old when we inherited her from our younger daughter’s best friend, who was moving abroad with her family. We already had a couple of cats and whilst initially Carrie and the moggies treated each other with caution, they quickly became great mates and indeed would often snuggle together in a basket at bedtime.

A few years earlier we had invested a large sum in a pedigree Irish setter puppy and inherited nothing but trouble and stress. Our attempts to house train the beautiful but highly-strung creature were a disaster to the point that visitors had difficulty working out which room was the toilet.

With the the red setter in grave danger of becoming a dead setter at the hands of her furious owners, something clearly had to give. And Beauty of Belhaven duly bounded off with her new owners six weeks later as the entire neighbourhood breathed a huge sigh of relief.

With Carrie it was entirely different. Calm and good natured, she was nothing like as excitable as Beauty. And she never had to ask to go out to do her business – she would squeeze her body though the cat-flap, albeit with some difficulty, and then squeeze back in when she had finished.

When we went out, we’d take her with us virtually everywhere and she adored sitting on the back seat looking out of the rear window. What she saw and how it affected her we had no idea – until one night when she demonstrated a sixth sense that was truly uncanny.

Perhaps once a fortnight my other half and I would have a meal at a casino three or four miles from home – and we’d occasionally take Carrie for the ride. We’d leave her in the car under the supervision of the car-park attendant while we dined and had a quick spin on the roulette table.

Carrie had been to the casino no more than three or four times – and always in the car, her eyes focused on the road behind as we headed towards our destination, and then home a couple of hours later.

One night, we went as a family to a restaurant for a meal, leaving the dog at home with the cats. When we got back, Carrie had disappeared but we weren’t overly concerned. Presumably she’d just gone out for a wee and a wander.

Then the phone rang. ‘‘Hello, this is the Salford Albion Casino,’’ said the voice on the other end.

‘‘Do you have a dog called Carrie?’’ Cue panic – and the thought that something dreadful had happened to the dog. ‘‘Yes, we do,’’ I replied nervously. ‘‘Well, she’s here wandering around. The parking attendant recognised her. We got her name and your number off her name tag.’’

I was flabbergasted. She had obviously gone looking for us, but how on earth had she got there? I mean the casino was several miles away, across at least a couple of main roads including the busy A56. And she could not possibly have followed a scent because she had only been there in the back of a car.

As we drove to the casino to collect Carrie, the only explanation we could come up with was that she had somehow remembered the route, even though she had never been there on foot and therefore could not have picked up a trail. Or could she? Who knows what goes on inside a dog’s brain – and how many extra senses they possess?

It’s 15 years or so since Carrie died that fateful December day. Fifteen years old and suffering from a heart complaint, I guess she had squeezed out through the cat flap during the night to do a wee, and suffered a fatal coronary attack as she tried to get back in.

She went to meet St Bernard at the Furry Gates still carrying the secret of her mysterious trek to the casino that remarkable night. Indeed, to this day I have no explanation how she found her way there.

Carrie gambled with her life i n that bizarre trek to the casino on highly-dangerous roads that night. And with her courageous if unnecessary mission to find us, she won even more of our love. RIP, little one.

Dogs v Cats (Part 2): It's a mog's life when your pets only speak Spanish

More humorous thoughts on the habits of our pets – including a plug for a special wee puss

At the risk of being dog-tagged for life as a mutt-hater, I’m sticking to my view that cats make better pets than their canine cousins. With one exception.

Dogs keep you fitter - and the bigger the better. In fact, if you can afford to buy and feed a Pyrenean mountain dog, he’ll be happy to drag you on a double marathon ‘walkies’ over the nearest 10,000-foot peak.

Before I came to Spain, my house in Manchester was at one time like a Home for Lost Pussies. So many waifs and strays came and went that I swear our friendly little dog Carrie thought she was a moggy herself.

She was certainly pretty adept at squeezing herself through the cat-flap as a quick means of exit, even if the poor mongrel never quite mastered the art of getting back in unassisted.

Because so much commitment is involved, I’ve not owned a dog since Carrie died aged 15 of a heart condition. However, my love affair with cats purrs along today at my villa near Guardamar, where I feed five ‘regular’ visitors. Two of them regard my lap as home. The others come for food, hang around for perhaps an hour, and then disappear into the night or day as the case may be.

The sad thing about our community of just 41 villas is that only mine has a regular feline presence. This means that when I go away – like my current visit to see my family in the UK – I face a ‘Cat 22’ situation. Do I ask neighbours to feed them and hope the moggies don’t miss me too much? Or do I send them to a cattery when the freedom of the campo is the only life they have ever known?

There was, of course, the option of taking them to England with me. But apart from the expense and inconvenience, not to mention the turmoil for the cats, all of them have a major communication problem. They can only miaow and purr in Spanish.

Last time I left a willing neighbour to feed them in my absence, the then community president and committee sanctioned a ridiculous resolution ordering residents NOT to feed animals outdoors.

Cat on the mat: My moggy Molly no habla ingles

As one might expect of non-pet people, they thought that leaving Brekkies out would encourage a plague of rats to scamper into their beds. I wish!

My neighbour, unwilling to go against community rules, promptly stopped feeding the moggies, and by the time I returned, at least one had had enough of waiting for the grub that didn’t arrive. I never saw her again.

The reality is that where there are cats, there are unlikely to be rats. In fact, any roaming rodent that wanders into the vicinity of Tiddles’ mouth is likely to become rat-atouille in an instant.

In my last article on dogs and cats, I gave readers chapter and verse on doggy poo and the filthy creatures who deposit and leave it as the staple diet for the soles of our shoes.

I just wish someone would invent incontinence pants for out-of-control growlers (that’s roughly 93 per cent of all dogs, by my reckoning) and with it redefine the expression ‘’doggy-bag’’.

I must emphasise here that a ‘’catty bag’’ is not the feline equivalent of a doggy bag, but a label one might put on a spiteful female of the human variety. I’m told that efforts were once made to breed a cross between a cat and a dog known as a ‘’catty bitch’’ but the animal was so venomous that scientists abandoned the project.

More seriously, cats are considerably less trouble than dogs. To start with, they never need a bath (just try giving them one and you may well get your head ripped off). They spend half their lives washing their body, legs and tail with their own saliva – and the other half trying to paw it all onto the top of their head – the one place their tongue can’t reach.

While Tiddles always washes herself, all Fido much prefers to wash YOUR face, hands, feet with a giant moist tongue that is as soft as a cat’s is rough.

Keeping Fido himself clean is a major operation. The best bet is probably to plonk him in the bath under a warm shower, though that is a bit of a gamble in itself. He’ll either love it or make a dash for safety, leaving the entire house three inches deep in water on his romp to the open front door – and then to the nearest garden wall for a mega-sniff of his pals’ doggy wee.

Unlike Fido and his mates, cats will also control their motions almost indefinitely. If there is ANY way Tiddles can avoid messing in the house, she will. I had one amazing female cat that, having sussed out the sewage system and knowing she’d fall off the seat if she tried to use the loo, always urinated in the bath. And right over the plughole, too.

That’s what I call a well-drained pet (God, the puns get even worse!)

Every moggy will head instinctively for the great outdoors when nature calls. Tiddles’ biggest failure here is that she tends not to look while she is burying her poo. She prefers to whirl round and round kicking soil, gravel and defecation into the air.

The end product is often a mound of soil topped by a modicum of No.2 – perfect for Fido to stick his nose in next time he comes back from soiling the neighbourhood streets.

Yet overall, and despite my own bias, it seems that animal lovers in general prefer dogs – but only just. A survey of 3,000 people in the UK found that 31% cent of households owned dogs and 26% cats.

All I can say is that if people are happy combining walkies with cleaning up their dogs’ runnies, that is their business. Personally, I’d rather settle down with my cats and watch our favourite film.

It’s called the Mog-nificent Seven.