Happy
Birthday Vincent .....
a cat who walked his talk ......
Morning! I’m letting Opie sleep in a bit this
morning. Wanted to stop in and say
THANK YOU to all of you helping Opie fulfill his dream of being a responsible
man cat, of leading with kindness and caring
and being a wonderful provider to all his charges, large and small. It’s no small feat to take on the
responsibility of caring for 1300 animals of 22 species. I know, I watch him work. In a way, I’m embarrassed to say as I do
more cat things all day long. Chase
thru the grass, snooze in the sun, climb trees, and hide here in the office on
rainy mornings.
But alas ... my poor boy
can’t climb trees. He was born differently
abled. Yet that tough start in life
hasn’t stopped him from anything but climbing.
Hasn’t stopped him at all. He’s
really come a long way from the poor little helpless little guy I gave birth to
on August 4, 2011.
Opie
Seems so long ago .... such
a different world .... a scarier time ... a time when I didn’t know if I could
possibly keep it together to raise my family.
Let me tell you about Opie’s
beginnings.
Guess it needs to start with
mine.
My first memories are living
with a parcel of hoomans. There were
big ones, little ones. The door was
open all the time. I went in and out as
I pleased. They’d snuggle me, they’d
feed me .... and sometimes they’d forget to let me back in a night. They forgot to take me to the speuter
clinic.
Vincent and Duke
So many of my kind that I’ve
met who have tough stories to tell ....
well, it’s all cus of that missed trip to the speuter clinic. If only all hoomans knew about that. Knew how much better our lives would
be. How much safer. How much longer. I do hope hoomans get smarter.
We need their help to get to the speuter clinics.
Anyway ... my story ...
Opie’s story. I wasn’t much more
than a baby myself when this traveling Tom came along .... and ohhhh weeeee was
he a cutie ... and he started paying attention to me!!!! Little ME !!! He was an older guy, experienced, and he liked me !!! He made me all kinds of promises, nose
kissed me, head butted me every time he’d see me. Than one day something felt funny, I was howling for no reason,
rubbing my belly on the ground .....
really feeling strange ... something had gotten into me that had never
been there before.
Nelly
Tom told me it’s called
nature ... the birds and the bees .... and he got really rough and did some
scary things. But I trusted him ...
he’d been my best friend. So I couldn’t
figure out why he vanished shortly after that.
It wasn’t long before I saw him courting the kitty that lived two houses
down.
Soon I started to get fat,
my insides feeling bumpy and jumping around.
That’s when the older mama cat next door had a talk to me and told me I
was gonna have kittens. KITTENS? I was barely a kitten myself.
The cycle of being pregnant,
giving birth, raising kittens, having the hoomans take them away, getting
pregnant again ...... went on and one
.... one litter after another .... and
the litters got bigger. The first time
it was only 3 ... then 4 ... then 6 ....
My family packed up one day
and left. Didn’t even take the
furniture or nothin. Loaded up some
boxes and their parcel of kids in the van, and took off. And never came back.
Vincent
I’d scratch at the door,
howl even. Nobody there to open
up. Soon a hooman came along and tossed
all their stuff on the street, and a truck came and took it away. The carpet, everything. The hoomans in the house painting chased me
out when I went in looking for nums.
They yelled at me .... Get out of here you stink rotten cat, you’re
probably the one who peed all over the carpet.
Well I had a time or
two. But what was I supposed to
do? If I was inside when the hoomans
went out, I got left in. If they were
gone a long time where should I go? I
couldn’t get out. Here at Rikki’s we
have indoor facilities they call litterboxes, nobody had that in my old
neighborhood.
I’d knew other cats who
never went in a house. Lots of
‘em. Some of them my kids and grandkids
and greatgrandkids ..... They found food
on a nice ladies porch and slept in any warm cubby hole they could find. So I joined them.
And once again I was
pregnant. I took up under a porch near
where my home had been and made a nest for my new batch of babies. This was getting old, real old, it was eat,
sleep, have babies. There had to be a
better way to live, just had to be.
Opie
This time I was enormously
fat. Old Tom and I had ended up with
several litters of kittens together.
These weren’t his. In all
honesty I don’t know who’s they were.
I’d taken to street life and when I got into the merowry howling rubbing
belly on the ground mode, I just didn’t care anymore ... there was no romance
anymore, not like with Old Tom, no nose kissing, no head butting ..... just one guy answering nature after another
... just like what I’d become. We
didn’t know any other way of life.
Please be sure everybody you
know goes to the speuter clinic. Please
.... we don’t keep having litter after
litter cuz we want to .... it’s cuz we
don’t know how not to. Please help us
and take us to the speuter clinic.
Anyway, this time I had nine
babies ... yeah, can you imagine ...
NINE !!!! I remember thinking,
as I lay there, giving birth to one ... two ... three .... four ... five ...
six .... seven ... eight ... nine ....
will this ever stop? How long
before I have elebenty seven? How long
before I simply pop before they’re born?
While I was cleaning them
up, exhausted, hungry, sick and tired of the thought of one more batch of kids
.... please don’t get me wrong ... I loved and cared for every one of my kids
.... but it was getting tiring. I was thin, I was hungry, I was tired. But I loved my kids and took the best care
of them I could. It was just getting so
hard .... and I was only three years old.
Actually getting old for street cat life.
Vincent
As I was cleaning up my new
batch of kids, I saw that two of them were so tiny. Less than half the size of the others. I wondered if they’d survive.
Some older moms had talked about inbreeding and how eventually it seemed
everybody ended up with sick and undersized babies, babies who died. Oh no, was I headed for this? So far all my kids had been healthy. And as much as I didn’t want more, didn’t
want to have to eat for 5 or 7 or 9 or now TEN ..... didn’t want to be suckled ... didn’t want to raise up another
litter ..... I loved them. Can you understand that? They were MY babies, I loved them ... even
though I wish I’d gotten into the speuter clinic ...
Were my two little ones
gonna die? They were weak. I tired to snuggle them even tighter and get
them nursing. Then I noticed a kitten
with no feet. Another missing an
arm. Oh my gosh, every one of the nine
had problems. Not a single one was
“normal”. All my babies were, what Opie
would later teach me, is called differently-abled. How was now going to try to struggle to find food and shelter for
me and nine handicapped babies?
Opie
I started begging the lady
who’s porch I was under to give me food.
She wasn’t a cat lady. Not by a
long shot. But she wasn’t cruel either. She yelled at the lady next door who liked
cats and who’d sometimes put food out for us.
She gave the porch lady a bag of food and told her to dump some out for
me every day.
The porch lady crawled half
way under the porch to put food there so it wouldn’t get rained on. She took one look at my new family and
started screaming. “Oh my gosh!! You HORRIBLE mother!! Help!!
She’s eating her babies!!”
What? I was licking them like a good mother does,
nursing them .... no way was I eating my own babies. And she kept screaming .... “She’s eaten their legs off! Somebody needs to take these babies away
from her.”
Well I later learned this
part of the story.
The porch lady called animal
control and reported a “horrible mother with a dozen kittens that were all half
eaten” and asked that someone come and take me away. We were living out near Waynesboro and animal control called a
nice lady they knew who rescued kittens, Barbara White.
Barbara and Opie
Barbara was horrified. “Eating her own kittens?” Could that poor mother be so hungry she has
nothing else? What should I do? How do I deal with this? Barbara called Kerry here at Rikki’s. Barbara had been rescuing kitties for a few
years, Kerry had been doing it for 30 something and had lots of experience, so
Barbara would ask her the tough questions.
Kerry said, “I don’t think
so. Mothers don’t do that. Go get the mom and kittens and call me back
after you see what’s going on. I’d
think it’s more like a predator or something that hurt a kitten. I don’t think the mom would do that. Don’t worry about plans right now. Just go get them and call me back.”
Next thing I knew, this nice
lady is crawling under the porch and picking me and all my kids up and putting
us in a cage. I got scared .... was she
taking us off to kill us .... I’d heard of the killing place .... would this be our end? She seemed so nice. She talked to me. When we got in her car, she looked over my babies.
I could hear what she said
when she called Kerry back. “All of
them, all nine of them, are missing feet, legs. It’s awful. Do you think
the mother did this? She seems so
nice.” And Kerry said, is there
blood? Does it look fresh? It sounds like they can’t be more than a day
or two old, if it was injuries you’d see that.”
“No,” said Barbara, “no
blood. Just clean stumps. All of them. Every single kitten is damaged.
The mom’s so nice, she’s just purring.
She wants to be with her kittens.
Do you think I need to separate them?”
“No,” said Kerry, “no. I think you have birth defects on your
hands. It doesn’t sound like injuries
and I’ve never never heard of a mother cat who’d chew limbs off each of her
kittens. Get ‘em checked out, I bet
it’s birth defects.”
Opie and Timmy
And so that’s when I met the
first doctor I ever saw. She confirmed
that it was birth defects and said probably from inbreeding. She offered to kill all my babies for
Barbara. I stood up and screamed and
Barbara started to cry. She didn’t want
to kill my family but the doctor was telling her it’d be best for all of us ...
poor handicapped babies ..... My gosh
... so it’s BEST for MY kids to be KILLED?
This nice lady had taken us to the killing place after all .... couldn’t leave well enough alone and let me
cope with raising my nine differently-abled babies on my own .... now gonna kill us all ? What kind of hell had I just entered into?
Barbara told the doc lady,
that she wasn’t going to kill us. I
breathed a sigh of relief. Barbara told
the doc she knew lots of differently abled animals who had good lives. The doc said my kids might die anyway. Barbara said that if they did, well so be
it, but she wouldn’t be the cause of it, she’d do her best to give us all good
homes.
Vincent
When Barbara got back in the
car with all of us .... thank you god, ALL of us .... she burst into
tears. That’s when I first heard about
Vincent. He was differently abled, Barbara
said. He was missing a leg and had
other problems and he’d taught her and almost everybody in the whole world that
being differently abled was ok and nobody should die cuz of it.
And then she called Kerry
and told her it was birth defects. She
asked if any of the kittens grew up too differently abled to get homes, could
they come live with Vincent and he train them to be Spokes Kitties. Hmmmm that sounded important !!!! And so that was the plan as Barbara took us
home.
She set up a nice place for
us to live in her bedroom. She helped
me out cuz it’s hard to nurse nine babies, she nursed some. WOW I didn’t know hoomans could do that
!!!
Nelly
The next day was very
sad. Barbara and I tried and tried to
make my two littlest ones get stronger ... but they got weaker .... and they
crossed over the Rainbow Bridge. We both
cried.
Now I had seven babies. And with Barbara’s help, they thrived. She fed me all I could eat. Good nums too. Soon you couldn’t even see my bones thru my fur. You had to pat me to tell I had any!!!
And my babies grew. When my family was about three weeks old, I
got sick. I had a high fever, I felt
awful, I couldn’t eat. Barbara took me
back to the doc. I got stuck with
needles, they took blood, they gave me medicine, but they didn’t know what was
wrong, but said I’d probably die ....
probably from not having gotten any shots ever before .... and they told Barbara it’d be best to just
kill me. Here we were again .... JUST kill me? JUST ..... like it’s no
big deal?
Barbara said no, give me
meds, tell me what to do, I’ll do everything I possibly can to help her get
well and I’ll take care of her babies until she does. And home we went. Barbara
held me and made me eat and gave me medicine.
She nursed my babies for me.
Vincent
In a few days I was feeling
better and able to help take care of the kids again. Barbara had done good ....
but she wasn’t licking them like a real mom should and they’d missed
that. I was glad to be back on the
job.
Then one of the babies got
sick. Lethargic, wouldn’t eat, hardly
moved. I was so scared when Barbara
took my baby to that doc. But she
brought him home with medicine. We tried
and tried, we made the baby eat, gave him meds, but he crossed the Rainbow
Bridge. Barbara and I hugged the rest
of my family and cried.
In the morning another baby
was sick. We tried and tried and she
crossed the Rainbow Bridge. And then
two were sick. One by one, as Barbara
and I worked round the clock, Barbara canceling everything else in her life to
help me save my family, one by one my babies died. Opie was the last, and he was so terribly sick. We just knew he was going to follow the others.
Barbara was talking to Kerry
and said, if I can save this last one, can he come and work with Vincent? And Kerry said sure. For days, Barbara and I took turns taking
care of Opie. Many times sure he was
gone ... and then he’d mew and move just a little and Barbara would get a
little fluids in and a few drops of milk.
After days and days, Opie
started to crawl again, was able to suckle, and started to get better. Thank you God, at least one of my babies
might live. And he did.
As they say, the rest is
history.
Though you might wonder why
I live at Rikki’s too. I’m perfectly
healthy. I’m very friendly. I could have been adopted out. So I’ll tell you why they let me live with
Opie.
Barbara introduces Opie to Vincent
Barbara had taken Opie out
to visit Vincent a couple times while he was growing. I was always very distressed when Opie was out of my sight. It’s rough, having kids, having them taken
away from you, always hoping they are in a good home, being treated right, not
taken to that killing place .... but you always wonder .... where is each and every one of my babies
.... any mother out there knows exactly
what I’m talking about. Each baby
taken, if a part of your heart ripped away.
And every time Opie would come back with Barbara I’d rush to him and
lick his face, so glad he, my surviving baby, my only family left on this
planet ..... was alive and well.
Then a day came when Opie
and I went for a trip. Barbara told me
we were going to Rikki’s. I’d get to
meet Vincent who was going to adopt Opie and then I’d be going on to my new
home with a nice lady she’d found. Oh
no ... the time had come .... they were going to separate us ... I’d never see
my baby Opie again. I was so sad. Why couldn’t Opie and I stay with this nice
Barbara lady forever?
Timmy, Vincent and Opie
At Rikki’s we met Kerry and
Vincent and a little guy named Timmy who was about Opie’s age and had hind legs
he couldn’t use well. Vincent nose
kissed Opie and me and welcomed us.
Timmy was a bit shy, but soon he and Opie where playing. I kept checking up on him and licking
him.
Then Barbara said, “Nelly,
come here ... here’s the lady who’s going to take you home, come meet
her!” No, no, no .... she looked like a nice lady .... but don’t
take me away from Opie, why can’t she take us both? I struggled out her arms and ran to Opie. Everybody talked about how sad this was but
how it was for the best.
The best for who, is what I
wanted to know. Barbara, the new lady,
Rikki’s .... would nobody let Opie and
me stay together? After all this, my
last family .... I’d been to the speuter clinic by now ... my last baby ....
the one we’d worked so hard to save ... my special baby .... I’ll never see him
again after today. I screamed and cried
and tried to scratch and bite as they put me in the carrier .... Opie came
running, trying to climb in with me.
Kerry started to cry. Barbara
started to cry.
Kerry said, can’t she stay
here with Opie too? Barbara’s face lit
up. The new lady looked a bit mad. Barbara told her she had other kitties for
adoption she’d just love. And they let
me out of the carrier. Opie and I hid
in the furthest back corner under the desk we could squeeze ourselves
into. Vincent came over and told me
it’d be ok. Kerry, who he called mom,
hated to see families broken up. She’d
do all possible to keep us together .....
forever and ever.
And so that’s how we came to
be at Rikki’s Refuge. I’m so thankful
to have been with my son, Opie, these last couple years, to watch him learn and
to take over when Vincent passed over the Rainbow Bridge. We all wish Opie had had a lot more training
from Vincent before Vincent had to leave, he was too young to go .... but sometimes we just don’t get to make all
the decisions. He’d had a hard start at
life ... his hoomans hadn’t taken him
to the speuter clinic either. His body
had been badly injured and though he had the best care in the world, 14 years
was as long as he could hold out.
Click Vincent to read his life story
Will you help Opie fulfill his dream of caring for all the
animals?
My poor baby really did
start at the bottom of the barrel .....
and before he was a year old, he was asked to take on such tremendous
responsibilities of caring for so many.
Of spending every day, helping others .... of thinking of himself last ... of never having a few free
minutes to sneak off and catch mice .....
would you .... could you ....
donate ONE DOLLAR to help him today?
Thank you for your kind and
generous donations: www.RikkisRefuge.org/Donate
Please
VOTE today and EVERYDAY!!
The Shelter Challenge is a
wonderful opportunity to help the animals with only a few clicks !!!! Totally FREE and EASY and QUICK .... turn your clicks into meds to prevent ticks
!!!!
Please vote today and every
day thru June 29 !!! Just go to this
link http://www.shelterchallenge.com/web/charityusa/nomineehome?userId=53331&nomineeId=17448
and
enter Rikkis Refuge (no ‘ ... see ??)
in VA in the USA and that’s it !! Thank you
NUMS for
YOU
you share with me, and I’ll share with you
try this wonderful vegan recipe today
Soup sounds good on a cold rainy day ....
Save a bowl for mom !!!
April 30
is
Would you
consider ....
THANK YOU
FOR HELPING OPIE TO CARY ON
VINCENT’S
TRADITION OF SAVING SO MANY LIVES
... with your support we’re
able to help so many into their new furrever happy homes .... and to give that life long home to those not
quite so fortunate ... Thank you for your
support
Without YOU none of us would
be looking forward to Spring!!
Love,
Nelly and Vincent
Rikki’s Web Site: www.rikkisrefuge.org
Help the Animals: http://rikkisrefuge.org/donate.php
