Still Searching

The past two days we've been looking for a kitten/cat. You would think it would be easy to find a cat, right? Not so, or at least so far.

We checked Monday at the local Humane Society. Rockport has an estimated population of about 8700 people and there are 89 cats at the shelter. Compare that to Deming, NM which has a population of 14,000 people and about 12 cats in their shelter. It seems that the folks in Deming take better care of their pets from the ratio of people to cats abandoned. I will say that the employees at the Rockport facility have tried to make a nice place for their cats, creating a large cage with climbing posts and perches on various levels. But we were there for kittens or young cats and the kittens were too young to be weaned from their mothers and the young cats had yet to be spayed and couldn't be adopted.

Our next stop was at the animal control center for the city. Here too, the kittens were too young or the cats too old. We need to find a youthful cat to train it to ride comfortably in the truck because of our lifestyle of moving every week or so. There was one pair of kittens that was the right age and they were very friendly but of course someone else had arranged to adopt both. Sigh.

The animal control officer was nice enough to call the next county's a.c. officer and check with her on the availability of kittens. She had none, but knew of a private owner who was trying to find homes for a litter or two (strays seem to find her apparently). That gal called me in the afternoon, but it seems that the weaned kittens had all been adopted. She tried to convince me that the younger ones would be eating solid food by the time we left the area, but I think she was pushing it just to get rid of the kittens, plus at the last minute she nonchalantly mentioned they were infested with fleas. Hmm, I think my interest in her kittens just evaporated.

I think we're not meant to get a kitten while in Texas. Since we're just stopping one night in Louisiana on the road east I guess Alabama will be our next state to check. A kitten with a southern drawl would be cute, right?