Canon PowerShot G9
ƒ/2.8
7.4 mm
1/10
200

This feral cat was very appreciative of the three bowls of milk I gave her this morning. Her seven kittens still have their eyes closed.

By this point, she trusts me, and is purring and kneading her paws in a hormonal stupor.

The local Estonians have named her “Dog” and built a wooden house for her to keep the predators out.

17 responses to “A New Mom”

  1. Oh, adorable. Look at those eyes.

  2. I just love those green eyes!

    Here are the seven dwarfs… They need better names…

    Babies

    Dog also reminds me of a lecture by Susan Blackmore: “My cat gives birth to a litter, purring all the way. It’s very different with humans and our large heads. It was a dangerous step in evolution. 2.5 million years ago, we started imitating each other. Our peculiar big brains are driven by the memes, not our genes. Language, religion and art are all parasites. We have co-evolved, adapted and become symbiotic with these parasites.”

  3. albino? or just genetic anomaly?

  4. Surely there is some ancient saying about kindness shown to a homeless mother cat coming back to you a thousand fold.

  5. wise vanita as always.
    (made me laugh loudly!) 😀

  6. oh! look at her eyes ~ she is so beautiful. what a wonderful image and story. agree with Vanita… although i fear the "thousand fold" return might have something to do with not getting the cat neutered… ;o)

  7. re: Susan Blackmore…. was reading in the wall street journal that "Brains have shrunk by about 10% in the past 5,000 years. Average shoe sizes have grown four sizes for men and women since 1900" … am wondering how that meshes with her ideas of parasitic memes and proportion.

  8. Thanks for licensing this image as CC "by" !
    Your photo is uploaded here :
    commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jurvetson_-_A_New_Mom_(by…
    under the terms of the Creative Commons "by" license.


    Seen on your photo stream. (?)

  9. When Jardina had her five she couldn’t give them enough milk, one nearly starved before we realised, so I got powdered baby milk and gave them each extra from tiny bottles…:)

  10. interesting stuff about memes and genes, my cats all seem to have fully blown personalities, all different, I think there is a bourgeois meme or gene there somewhere

  11. I realized later that the main point here is that the Momma cat represents a clear case of a successful seed stage, subsequent nurturing incubation, followed by emergence, acceptance, and growth, presumably to result in further generation of spin-offs ……. at a later date

  12. I found your image on the wikimedia commons.

    If the mom let you get that close, let you feed her, purred for you, she was probably not a truly feral cat. She was probably born to a domesticated mother, handled in a loving way as a kitten, and then abandoned when she was no longer cute.

    I strongly doubt a truly feral cat would have ever let you see her kittens, let along take pictues of them.

    You don’t happen to know what happened to the kittens afterwards?

  13. Right you are. And mom still hangs around. I just gave her some milk.

    We had everyone neutered and got homes for them. We took "Keeper" and "Scratchy"

  14. Ah, a good news story… Thanks for the update

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