Oh dear. Cat trouble all around, it seems.

Pursuant to the loss of the elderly Sir Grey, my mother has decided to reserve another Maine Coon kitten. Her reasoning, which I fully agree with, is that no animal as social as a Maine Coon should be solitary, and they had reserved him months ago expecting the little guy to have a dog and a cat to romp with. An empty house is unfair. So, Mum has decided to go ahead and reserve a silver Maine Coon from the same breeder, despite my father’s waffling (and if he finds out via my blog, I do apologise, but you had at least two days to tell him, Mum). This one’s ETA is December, so Seamus will only have three months on his own. (Yes, three months; when did it get to be three months to the end of the year?)

On top of that, Scarlet has e-mailed to inform me that the feral cat who produced the litter of kittens we’ve been nursing tested positive for feline immunodeficiency virus, which means that it might have been passed to the kittens in utero or via the mother’s milk. There�s no way to tell until they’re tested after four months old, since they can still possess a sort of trace phantom FIV from contact with the mother until that age. The main problem is that an FIV positive cat can’t be in contact with an FIV negative cat, or the virus can be passed along.

This is a problem, of course, since Scarlet was hoping to have all these cats gone to good homes as soon as possible, so she could have her office back to normal. If we can’t mix these cats with her other non-FIV household cats — well, you see the problem. It also means that she has to keep the kittens till they’re four months old and tested to ascertain their FIV status, because it would be irresponsible to pass a potentially FIV-positive cat along to a household with non-FIV cats.

There are irresponsible people out there, of course. We are not members of that particular demographic. So these cats will stay at home for two extra months, and once we’ve found out whether they’re FIV positive or negative, we’ll be able to place them properly.

Oh dear, indeed.