Three new ‘guests’ arrive at B and B on Eureka Street

We found ourselves back in the damncat business and not in a good way this week at Annie-Glenn’s Bed and Breakfast on Eureka Street: three new kittens have appeared.
Not that I should be surprised. I knew that a fertile female remains the feral colony, but after several years with no new kittens, I let my guard down.
We have had spay and neuter success with cooperative veterinarians both here and in New Orleans. They have performed the tasks at minimum cost on an outpatient basis. Rosemary and I think that the whole colony in New Orleans has been rendered non-fertile, but I got lazy on Eureka Street. The mama damncat would swell larger and larger during pregnancy, then she’d miss a meal and show up for the next meal looking depleted of offspring and very hungry.
We went through this several times without seeing any kittens, assuming that she’d hatched them in a hidden location next door. We expected to see her eventually, when they got old enough for her to wean, leading her kittens to our back porch where she feeds. But they never came, and trapping the mama damncat for a quick trip to the vet became less of a priority. Until this week.
Meanwhile, there was a confrontation on the back porch that confirmed my suspicions about what’s been happening to those kittens that never showed up. I looked through the glass storm door after the adult damncats had mostly finished eating and saw one of the kittens eating with as much voracious enthusiasm as such a tiny creature can muster. But its mama was pacing nervously, going from one side of the small stoop to the other, looking down.
I knew what she was looking for. Within a few seconds a big coon appeared — climbing over the side of the porch. He or she immediately started scarfing down cat food as fast as it could from the same pan as the kitten fed from. In a flash, that mama damncat jumped on that coon with a fury such as only a mama protecting its young can muster.
Her attack was not without effect on the coon, who appeared to hunker down as though he or she was determined to stay and feed, even if it had to endure a clawing. I opened the back door and the coon quickly climbed down from the porch and ran under a nearby storage shed as though I was more of a threat than the enraged feline.
The moral of this story — if there is one — is that (1.) coons are not a reliable a means of damncat population control and their methods are more grisly; (2) there is more fury in a mama protecting her young than even a woman scorned; (3) and why, oh why, if we were going to eventually find ourselves in some kind of animal husbandry, did we not choose some creature with a more useful output.
(Alas, number 3 is the same moral of every damncat story I’ve ever written.)