Too Many Kittens!!

Being responsible for the kitty portion of this blog is a big responsibility!  I have been working so hard!  I have to use my ears to hear what's happening in this place and then I have to learn new things!  I think maybe I'm too old for this job!  But I've been studying and today I'm going to tell you some of the things I've learned about kittens!  But before I do I promised I would show you where I live.  So here you go.  This is it.

One of my people friends, Vickie, the one who carries her big camera around all the time, called this my Queendom!  Isn't that cool?!  I'm not a queen!  But Adam was a king, so . . . .  Queen Smokey?  Hmmmm.

Okay now to kittens.  I've been hearing my people talk about "too many kittens."  Well, I didn't understand what they meant because we don't have kittens at StreetCats.  Not really little ones.  So I just kept listening until I figured out that outside of StreetCats there are too many kittens who never find a nice place to live.  That is so sad!!  So I started doing some reading to see what we need to know in order to help.

First, I'll tell you a story about how cats came to be.  This is a Hebrew story and is about when all the animals were on the ark with Noah.  Well, when he loaded up there were no little cats, only big ones like lions and tigers.  But the rats on the ark weren't being nice.  They were making baby rats really fast and they were eating up the food on the ark!  So . . . God made a lion sneeze and out flew a cat!  I'm pretty sure not everyone believes this Hebrew legend, but I don't doubt it.  I mean look at me!  Don't I look a little like a lion??

Well, however kittens got here, there are for sure a lot of them!  I read that there are 500 million domestic cats in the world!  Wow, sort of puts my life in perspective!!  But there are also a lot of cats who aren't domesticated.  They're wild!!  I read that there are 60 million in the US alone!!  The people call them feral cats.  And here's something else that is absolutely shocking!  Not everyone loves cats in the way my StreetCats people do!  Maybe they love them in a different way, because in Asia, 4 million cats are eaten every year . . . by people!  I have learned that there is such a thing as learning too much!  I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing that and it would have been just fine!  I also could have gone without learning the mean things people have done to cats . . . because they are afraid of us!!  Really?!  Afraid of us???  I'm not even going to tell you any of the things that have been done!  You don't need to hear it!  I'll just say I'm even more thankful now for the people at StreetCats who take care of me!!

I'm going to stop writing now.  Next time I write I'll tell you what StreetCats is doing about the too many kittens problem.  Let me leave you with just a little more info.  A cat can have up to nine kittens at one time!  And they might not look alike because they can have different dads.  Shocking!  I read the largest litter ever recorded was 19 babies!  The oldest cat to have kittens was 30 years old.  In her life she had 218 kittens!  I bet she was tired!  Now here is a math problem for you.  How many kittens might a pair of cats be responsible for producing?  No matter what answer you come up with, it's a heck of a lot!