T Travels: Rasta Kitty has Kittens!

Rasta, our adorable stray Guyanese kitten that we adopted about 4 months ago when we found her on the side of the road, got pregnant! We had plans to get her fixed as soon as she was big enough but the little hussy ran off and got herself preggo before we could get her to the vet! So, for 9 weeks we had a lazy, pregnant kitten lounging around our apartment. Well, last Thursday (on our 8 month anniversary of being in Guyana) Rasta delivered her kittens!

Tim says the represents the end of Rasta's innocence. She is no longer playing with her blue ball because she is too pregnant, instead she sprawls by her birthing box and awaits her fate....

Tim and I were just about to make dinner when we noticed Rasta pacing back and forth and going in and out of her litter box. We noticed a white, gooey glob in the box and immediately got online to figure out what it was. After browsing the amazing annals of the internet we learned that it was her mucus plug and Rasta was about to give birth. Now, in anticipation of this event, I had placed “nests”, specifically cardboard boxes filled with newspaper, all around the house so Rasta could choose where she wanted to birth her babies. Instead we saw her meander over to the bottom shelf of our homemade bookcase where we keep our clothes. As we hustled to remove our clothes and put down material that we wouldn’t mind messing up Sara noticed that there was something strange about Rasta, she was meowing and panting and purring all at the same time.

“Is she having her babies?” I asked. “Um, yeah…” Sara replied. And as I turned around I saw a black, sticky mass hanging half way out of Rasta. The kitten was breached and Rasta couldn’t get her baby out. She was freaking out, clawing at me, meowing, turning in circles and dragging her baby, still halfway inside her, around the room. At this point, I started to freak out too. “Should I pull it out?!?” I squeaked, panicked. Tim flew to the computer to see if it was okay for a human to assist a car in labor, after all cats have been doing this forever without us, right? Well, I didn’t want to wait for him to find the answer so I gently eased the kitten the rest of the way into this world. As I laid it on the floor, Sara and I were pretty sure it was dead. Tim ran back into our room, “Is it dead?” he asked. But Rasta knew what to do. She licked the baby clean of the sticky mucus and it began to squeak and twitch. She then quickly gnawed off the umbilical cord with her teeth and delivered the placenta and ate it. She picked up kitten Numero Uno by the scruff of its neck, carried it into the birthing nest in our bookshelf and proceeded to have two more babies over the span of the next two hours. The next two kittens, Numero Dos and Runt (the smallest little dude ever) came out easily and quickly.

It was amazing to watch! All three of us (Tony was in G/Town writing the Peace Corps Guyana newspaper, the Gaff) had lost track of time, forgotten to eat dinner, and were amazed that three and a half hours had passed with us sitting on the floor enraptured by the miracle of birth taking place.

Now the babies are four days old and all are healthy little squeakers. They are blind and deaf and completely rely on Rasta for everything. Now that she has gotten the hang of it, she is a great mom. She decided to move her babies from where she gave birth (to throw predators off her trail, I guess) to a little cubby under the counters in our kitchen. One by one she gently bit them on their scruffs and toted them to the cubby where they are presently sleeping. Rasta nurses them, licks them clean and snuggles them. In between all those tasks, she leaves the nest and takes naps on her own. All new moms need breaks from babies, don’t they?

Since cats can get pregnant almost immediately after they give birth, we are keeping Rasta inside so she can’t get herself into trouble with the tom cats in the neighborhood. She is not happy about her house arrest but oh well, it is for her own good. She will be nursing the kittens for the next 4-6 weeks and then we will help wean them, get them eating kitten food. Then we are going to get the whole family spayed/neutered! It costs about $40 US per cat but we are trying to be responsible here and don’t want to contribute to the already sadly un-spayed/neutered population of household pets in Guyana. Ideally, we are going to adopt the kittens off to other Peace Corps Volunteers. We will keep you posted on the status of these little guys along the way.

Overall, it was a crazy experience and I am stoked to have more little bundles of love around the house to snuggle and play with. Enjoy the pictures!

A blurry picture of me, sitting by our bookshelf. Rasta is behind the pink bandanna, giving birth to Numero Dos. I just pulled a kitten out of Rasta so I am a little freaked out...