Creek Running North

After hearing my whole life about the ordeal of post-exposure rabies prophylaxis, the reality is, shall we say, somewhat anticlimactic.

Becky has been capturing the feral cats in the neighborhood, altering and releasing the adults (and believe me, that release part comes under some duress; our feelings about trap-neuter-release are far from uniformly positive). The kittens she’s trapped are being routed to adoption agencies, with mostly good results so far.

Thistle has moved out of his rabbit hutch into a capacious new cage that allows him to come and go as he pleases, and we’ve been keeping kittens in his old hutch in the garage. The last batch comprised four cuties of about six or seven weeks of age, and Craig and I spent a lot of time handling them, clucking at them when they hissed at us, and generally coaxing them to purr and mew and act like pet cats. This was successful, and the four are embarked on new lives as lap cats.

So when I came home the other day to Craig telling me that they’d caught a gorgeous little white kitten, I headed for the garage, picked the thing up, and attempted to calm it past its hissing.

Craig met me in the kitchen a couple minutes later, looked at the stream of blood flowing off my right hand, and said “I suppose I should have told you it’s not very friendly.”

Oh, I deserved everything the cat did to me. I picked it up, refused to admit to myself that the cat was really unhappy, and it struggled and batted at my arms for probably a full two minutes. Finally, at wits’ end after howling and hissing and batting and me still not letting go, it sank its fangs deep into my right index finger and held on.

So yesterday I got four injections: one long-overdue tetanus shot, two in the ass with 11 milliliters each of immunoglobulin, and one in the remaining arm with the rabies vaccine. I need to go back four more times for the rest of the rabies series.

I could actually have avoided all but the tetanus by having the public health people quarantine the kitten for ten days. But if the thing has any chance to be tamed, it needs those ten days in a calm, friendly household. And the worst part of the injections is the hassle of driving to the hospital. Gone are the days of cruel spikes in the gut: today’s rabies vaccinations are hardly noticeable. Progress.

After I came home yesterday, we caught another couple kittens: tiny gray dots who hiss and growl amusingly and ineffectually curled up in our palms. We’ve been hand-feeding them. They’ll do well.

Update, 1:17 PM. As the feral cat rescue person was getting ready to leave with the above-listed cats, we caught two more of the little grays’ siblings, bringing the total rescued kittens to one dozen for the year.