Farewell to Kiya

Regular readers will recall me mentioning Kiya last month when I wrote about Ptolemy dying. Kiya was one of last year’s kittens. Of the four born, one died within hours and Kiya along with her two brothers appeared to be healthy. Unfortunately when she was about eight weeks old she suffered a urinary tract infection. We had been concerned prior to this that she appeared to be incontinent. We presumed that the two were linked. What followed was a series of antibiotics treatment which saw her overcome the infection, but the incontinence remained.

Kiya, along with her mother comes from a semi-feral colony loosely owned by our neighbour. I say loosely because he takes no responsibility for them, he just lets them be. This means that the toms hang around and the resultant incest leads to successively weaker kittens. This explained the mystery of the relatively low amount of new generations that we saw. We had presumed that he drowned unwanted kittens, but he doesn’t even take that much notice. It explains why Minnie gave birth to four stillborn kittens. This is, to our knowledge, her second pregnancy and from those two pregnancies, only one kitten has survived.

We suspected that Kiya had an ectopic ureter. The vet advised trying medication for a neurological problem first. So poor Kiya spent a couple of months being medicated for this. There was a slight improvement, but Mrs L suggested that as it was summer and Kiya was out most of the time, we weren’t noticing it so much. By the turn of the year, it became obvious that this was not working. The vet then suggested what we had suspected all along – an ectopic ureter. This was operable, but would be expensive. However, before any such operation took place, they had to check the condition of her kidneys. That was the bomb-shell, both kidneys were failing. So, no operation. All we could do was manage the condition and when the time came, a final trip to the vet. The vet’s prognosis was that she would live a few weeks at best. As it turned out, it was closer to three months.

We thought this was going to happen over Easter, but she rallied and spent the next few weeks almost her old self, playing in the garden with her siblings and hunting the odd rodent.

Yesterday morning, I noticed her sunning herself in next door’s garden. By late afternoon, I realised that I hadn’t seen her about, so we went looking. I found her under a hedge, almost lifeless. It was too late to involve the vet as out of hours cover involves an hour’s trip to Montpellier. All we could do was make her comfortable and a couple of hours later she slipped peacefully out of our lives.

On the one hand, I am angry that our neighbour allows a feral colony to continue to inbreed, creating such unnecessary death and weakened genes. On the other, there are some compensations. For thirteen brief months we got to share this beautiful creature’s company. She lived longer than if we had not been around. And, when it came, the end was mercifully quick and peaceful.