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Little Checkers:
A Cautionary Tale |
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About five years ago, after a rough divorce, I packed up my two children and
my five cats and drove non-stop from Paso Robles, California, to Dallas,
Texas. Four of the cats were older and had been fixed and vaccinated, but
the youngest, a female kitten named Mittens, was the victim of my
inattention due to the upheaval in my life and had been neither spayed nor
vaccinated.
Soon we all settled in to a suburb east of Dallas, and on my birthday, I got
another kitten, this one from a shelter in the area. She was a lovely little
bit of fluff that I called Cleo. Coming from California, I had assumed that
the shelters in Texas would vaccinate their animals before selling them to
the general public. However, this was not the case and Cleo, as I found out,
was a carrier of the feline leukemia virus, which she passed on to Mittens.
Mittens, in the mean time, had slipped out one evening and had a night of
romance with a black and white Manx. Naturally she became pregnant, and 60
days later delivered four beautiful kittens, two with long tails and two
with stumps like the father. They were all born with the virus, and were
rather sickly from the beginning. My favorite one was a black and white
female with a long tail whom we named Checkers. She was a lively little
thing, sweet and friendly, who used to love to curl up in my purse to sleep.
The kittens all had bouts of vomiting followed by severe lethargy and weight
loss. Checkers seemed to suffer the most of all the kittens. When the others
would get over their bouts of being sick, she would continue to lay around
with her third eyelids up. She would always purr for me, even when she felt
crappy. By the age of six months one of the four actually developed immunity
to the virus, one had it but it was dormant, one had it but was dealing with
it, and poor Checkers had developed leukemia.
The last time I took her into the veterinarian, they looked into her poor little
mouth and it was obvious there wasn't any red blood cells left the inside of
her mouth was white like chalk. The vet gasped when he saw it, and he told
me bluntly that the kindest thing I could do for Checkers was to put her to
sleep and end her misery.
I knew he was right, and I agreed. I petted that poor baby as she lay on the
cold steel table, and she looked me in the eyes and purred loudly. She
looked at me and kept on purring as the vet was euthanizing her. Tears were
streaming down my face and I could barely contain my grief as her eyes went
from warm and loving to glazed-over and fixed. The purring stopped and she
was still. Her death was peaceful and she knew she was loved, but seeing my
kitty die in front of my eyes was terribly traumatic. I was so upset by it
the vet's assistant actually had tears well up in her eyes and had to leave
the room. The vet offered to dispose of the body but I held her like a baby
and, wrapping her in a towel, I took her home. My youngest daughter and I
gave her a tearful burial with her favorite toy.
My grief was compounded by the fact that this was something that could have
and should have been controlled...mostly by me, for not getting the mother
cat spayed and vaccinated in a timely manner, but also by county-run animal
shelters in the area, for not vaccinating animals and making sure they have
no communicable diseases before selling them to people.
Poor little Cleo died later that year as well, also from leukemia. She never
made it to the point of having to be euthanized. We found her dead one
morning, another kitty to cry over and bury.
I cannot stress this enough.....vaccinate your kitties early, and make sure
they are spayed or neutered as soon as possible. The pain of putting an
animal to sleep is hard to endure, and it still pains me to think of it
years later.
I found a picture of little Checkers last week as I was going through some
old photos....she was curled up in my purse and had a goofy kitten smile on
her sweet face as she looked up at the camera. I can only imagine what a
wonderful cat and companion she would have been....
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