Today is a day I will remember always. And not in the good way, I’m afraid. It’s the type of decision you don’t want to make, but you know you have to. I sincerely don’t know what to feel other than sadness and the thought if there was something else we could have done.
A few weeks back our cat, Pandora, had a litter of kittens. 3 kittens to be exact. We had been planning on neutering her, but somehow it slipped through our fingers, and we didn’t get a chance to do so until recently. That is, after she had the kittens. We worked hard to give away those three.. luckily we were able to give away two, and the last kitten, well, stayed with us till we found a way to sort this out. Marte is pregnant and the due-date for the baby is coming up, not to mention that we already have two cats, Pandora and Spotty, and our dog Mana. Needless to say that we couldn’t really keep the last kitten, being that we’ve already so many animals AND a baby on the way. And there’s still so much work to do on the house.
We tried everything, putting up posters, asking friends, even calling rescue-homes to see if they could accept kittens. In the end none of these things resulted fortunate. After having talked about it a lot, we finally came to the conclusion, as hard as it might be, that the kitten had to be put to sleep. The other kittens we had given away were attention-seeking, so when you went on your knees they came to you and wanted to cuddle. This last kitten wasn’t so, something was definitely up. Hissing at people and scratching when they came closer are just two of the things that seemed out of place. Would you have taken such a kitten in? We tried spending time with it to make it tame, but to no result.
It’s been on our minds for days, and yesterday it happened. Marte and I cried.. a lot. We had tried to distance us from the kitten since we decided, but still we both cried and cried. I haven’t felt so sad in a very long time.
Not having neutered Pandora before was our fault, so we take 100% responsibility for that. But we tried.. we really tried. If there is a force like God out there, I hope he will find it in his heart to forgive us someday. Or even better yet – that we will be able to forgive ourselves. But this is something that we’ll have to live with for the rest of our lives, and probably beyond that. That might be punishment enough.
