It was a heart-wrenching discovery. Someone zip-tied four newborn kittens together and left them — covered in fleas and with their umbilical cords still attached — abandoned in a shopping cart.
The smallest two kittens would not live through the day. The other two tiny tabbies, less than five days old when found, are fighting to survive.
Just who tied up the kittens remains a mystery.
The surviving pair had an encouraging first night of recovery Tuesday after a team of good Samaritans raced them to Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe. There, they latched onto feeding bottles. Their back legs — initially found tied in extremely unnatural positions, cutting their circulation — don’t appear broken, although one kitten’s left hind leg suffered significant injury and it could be infected.
Kendall Schulz, the animal center’s adoption services director, says they’re “fighters. They’ve got a lot of people rooting for them.”
The four newborns were found on the flatbed under a shopping cart Tuesday afternoon in a Riverside County shopping center. Each kitten had its hind legs bound together, Schulz said. The bound kittens were also tied together in one bunch.
The find triggered what would become a relay of people driving the kittens south, handing them off in a race to Helen Woodward Animal Center.
Helen Woodward center spokesperson Jessica Gercke said the site has a fully staffed medical unit and an extensive list of people willing to bottle feed foster kittens, “which few facilities have.” Schulz said that ability to quickly find and provide such attentive care is why the decision was made to drive the cats to the northern San Diego County facility. Newborn kittens must be fed every two hours or they can die.
“At that point, we still don’t know if they are going to be alive when they get to us,” Schulz said. She was the one who took the kittens inside to the center’s Companion Animal Hospital.
“It looked like it had been purposeful to hurt the animals,” Schulz said.
There were two pairs, smaller gray kittens and slightly larger orange tabbies. It’s unclear if they were from the same litter. The little ones would not eat. “They were too far gone,” Schulz said. They died within hours of arriving.
But the two orange kittens did something encouraging — they provided physical evidence they had eaten something at some point in their new lives.
“I’ve never been so happy to see poo,” Schulz said. “That means at some point, they had a mom they nursed on. It makes (chances of) survival exponentially better.”
Each eventually latched onto a tiny bottle “pretty well,” she said. The kittens are too little to be given pain medicine, so injuries are being treated with topical numbing agent. A hind leg of one of the kittens is severely swollen, but it’s “purple, not black.” Again, encouraging.
Even before the kittens had arrived, the center had lined up “one of our best fosters,” a caregiver willing to take on continual bottle feeding for the pair. She is also armed with a flea comb — they are too young for flea medication — and Schulz said the caregiver will see to it that they are flea-free.
“We are cautiously optimistic,” Schulz said. “Kittens are unpredictable.” But they are, by all s, eating well. They don’t appear to be in discomfort. They are so young, their eyes are still closed. They squeak more than meow.
The kittens are, for now, named Frodo and Sam, after “The Lord of the Rings” characters. Frodo is the slightly bigger one, which Helen Woodward staffers believe is a boy. Sam is probably male, too. The hope is to get them better and, in several weeks, get them adopted.
With the kittens in good hands, the center is hoping to figure out who tied and abandoned them. “This seems pretty purposeful and cruel,” Schulz said.
She said the organization will work to ensure the appropriate law enforcement agency is notified of the matter.
