The following post comes to us from guest blogger Krissy Gogel. A web designer and cat mommy, Krissy can be found online at 6bdesign.com.

I live in a busy suburban neighborhood located minutes outside of Baltimore City. Between people ignoring the stray cat population in the area and all of the un-spayed/un-neutered “house cats” that are allowed to roam the streets, my neighborhood has become home to an overwhelming amount of feral cats.

If you live in an area overrun with stray or feral cats like I do, there are countless reasons why you should act to help them, one of which, Marley, is sitting next to me right now.

Hey, That’s Not a Rake!

In April of this year, I went to my shed for a rake to begin the process of cleaning my yard in preparation for summer. Instead of a rake (although I’m sure it was in there), I found six beautiful 4-week-old kittens; two of which had horrible eye infections.

I knew that I couldn’t leave them there to live with the lawnmower and gas cans, so I took them in, bottle fed them, raised them and treated them for infection. It was a task being as my husband and I already had a houseful of rescued cats and dogs! We had to keep our pets isolated from our new kittens – not as easy as it sounds. We spent tons of money on kitten-safe cat litter, formula, food, toys, etc. It was all worth it to see them run, jump, play and grow into lovable cats. After a few months, we were lucky enough to find loving, permanent homes for five of the six kittens, keeping little Petey for ourselves.

Teach the Children Well

As much as I enjoyed raising the kittens, it was a lot of hard work. Thankfully there are tons of resources on the web that offer tips on how to feed, litter train, and house the kittens. The only “tips” that most of those sites lack are “tips” on how to RAISE the kittens.

Although mixing and feeding the kittens the right amount of formula might be the most pressing issue at first, there is something else that you need to do when raising kittens – love them! Most of the “how to raise kittens” sites don’t emphasize how important it is raise the feral kittens to become loving cats. I made sure to spend many hours of every day playing, loving, and bonding with the kittens so that they’d share affection and bond with other people. I’m very glad I did – they all turned out to be perfect editions to the families who adopted them.

They Didn’t Come From the Stork…

Naively, we really didn’t think about where these kittens had come from. All that we knew for sure was that we needed to raise them and find them good homes. A few months later in August, we decided we knew who the “momma cat” was. We found her at our doorstep, completely emaciated and terrified of people – she was feral. Our plan was to find an organization that practiced TNR – trap-neuter-return. Such organizations will help you trap feral cats, have them fixed at a reasonable cost, and release them back into the neighborhood. We made nice with her, fed her and gained her trust.

Unfortunately within a few day of discovering her, we discovered something else. There were six or seven kittens, this time under our front porch…

Want to find out what happened to Krissy’s next set of kittens? Check back tomorrow for a surprising turn in part two of “Diary of a Stray Cat Mommy,” along with tips on what to do if you have feral cats in your neighborhood.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 7:59 am and is filed under Guest Blogger, Pet Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.