Fostering animals is really rewarding, and sometimes can be very sad. Yesterday was one of the sad days.
About eight weeks ago we trapped and tamed five feral kittens. Four are healthy and happy, but one started out that way and suddenly began to go downhill. While he ate like a horse, he didn't gain weight and in fact began losing. We took him to the vet; they did tests and offered medications, but nobody knew what was wrong with him. This past week he caught a URI, and began getting rapidly worse. More tests, more medications, no answers.
Yesterday we put the kitten down. The vet had no idea what was wrong with him, but his white cell count was 45,000 (a "normal" high count in a cat is 15,000) and he'd lost weight even in the two days since he'd last been seen. She felt he had some kind of massive internal infection, which would be expensive to continue to combat. Even then, she said, his prognosis was highly guarded at best.
One of the sucky things about my world is that I don't have infinite financial resources. If we had, we may have spent them on him. But we don't, and the organization we work with doesn't, either. And sometimes you have to choose to save the ones you can.
We had a bottle-fed kitten die from failure to thrive last fall, but the mortality rate of bottle babies is pretty much expected. This kitten seemed as healthy as his siblings, and then suddenly he wasn't.
I feel very guilty about doing what I did. I cried a lot, and the vet hugged me and told me that I was really doing the right thing. Even with round-the-clock care he may still have died, but it just would have taken longer and he would have suffered even more than he already had. So I guess ending his suffering was the right things to do. I wish I could believe it.
When I pulled into the driveway, the kitten's mother was sitting in the vacant lot next door, staring at me. When we'd trapped the kittens I promised her that they would have a good life, and that we'd take good care of them. And I feel like I let her down.
So I sat in the car and cried for a long time. I cried for little Thor, who would never get to grow up and live in his own home with his own family. I cried for his twin brother, Loki, who looked for Thor when he came home from adoption. I cried for his mother, Endora, whose owner didn't care enough about her to get her fixed and carelessly abandoned her to fend for herself outside, where she became feral and terrified of people.
As I watched his siblings running around the house last night, I kept wishing that Thor was there playing with them. And tried to be glad that he wasn't sick and weak anymore.