A loving mom cat helps foster felines

Sep. 22--HERMITAGE -- She normally has the kittens for about 12 weeks, but out of the hundreds of cats Sue Smith has fostered for more than a decade, a few cases still stick with her -- such as the first litter of kittens she ever fostered.

At that time, a stray cat brought a litter of kittens to Smith's home. She had the kittens tested and they tested positive for feline leukemia, a terminal illness. But instead of having the kittens put down, Smith decided to care for them and make the kittens' short lives as comfortable as possible.

For about three years, the mother cat brought her litters to Smith's Hermitage home. All of the kittens tested positive for feline leukemia and none of them lived longer than six months, although Smith -- who had experience as a veterinary technician -- continued caring for all of them, even when the mother remained out of reach.

"I tried so hard to get her trapped and spayed, but I could never get near her," Smith said of the mother cat.

Eventually the mother cat was found dead, but that didn't put an end to Smith's mission to care for kittens. Right after the mother cat's death, Smith was buying litter and food for her own cats when she bumped into Karen Pollock, an acquaintance from the group Animal Advocacy.

She needed someone to serve as a cat foster mom.

In the years since, Smith love for animals and the willingness to foster kittens who need that extra attention has not diminished. She has 10 cats of her own and about 23 foster kittens. To meet that need, Smith turned her garage into a makeshift kennel, with the necessary heating and space for the kittens to play and remain comfortable.

"Fostering is care from day one, whether it's kittens that need bottle-fed, getting them checked by a vet and getting them on good nutrition, so by the time they're ready for adoption, they're done," she said.

Animal Advocacy dissolved about a year and a half ago, and Smith started fostering kittens for the Shenango Valley Animal Shelter, where space limits the number of animals that can be housed at any one time.

Around-the-clock attention needed, particularly by young kittens, can be difficult to maintain with the shelter's staff, animal shelter Manager Angelia Sherman said.

"The kittens need to be bottle fed every few hours, they often need to be cleaned as if the mother is cleaning them, anything that young can't really eat hard food, and you have to make sure each one of them gets the proper care, medications and antibiotics," Sherman said.

Since last year, Smith has fostered about 150 cats for the animal shelter. Sherman said she doesn't know how Smith does it.

"It's very selfless what she does. There's a lot of late nights, a lot of hours, and a lot of sleepless nights I'm sure, but she really has become a member of our family," Sherman said.

Animal Shelter board President Duane Piccirilli agreed with Sherman that Smith's willingness to help is important in supporting the shelter's work.

"It's the great volunteer support from people like Sue that'll make it possible for us to do our job and to move into a bigger facility and help more animals in the valley," Piccirilli said.

The animal shelter's limited capacity is strained further by the reproductive activity of stray cats in the area.

The average cat can have a litter of four to six kittens, with a mother cat able to become pregnant again once her kittens are 8 to 9 weeks old. Meanwhile, the kittens can be ready to have their own litters at about four months old, Smith said.

"Normally what we call 'kitten season' happens in the spring and we see a resurgence in the fall, but with such mild winters, we can see 'kitten season' all year round," Smith said.

This overpopulation problem is why it is important for cat owners to get their pets spayed or neutered, even if the cat is a stray that visits their property only occasionally to eat. Smith said she understands this can be difficult since cost can sometimes be an issue for people, while trap-and-release programs aren't available everywhere.

The fostering aspect can also be time-consuming -- Smith's day begins at about 5 a.m., and she stops at home again during her lunch break. Cats are skilled at hiding illnesses and kittens can decline rapidly, so Smith said it's important to give each of those kittens not just care but enough attention to intervene if a kitten is sick.

Smith said the work can sometimes be exhausting and emotionally draining, but caring for cats is "in her blood" and she thinks more cats would suffer if she didn't help get some of them proper care and into loving homes.

While she is still affected by the first litters she cared for even as they had no hope for survival, Smith said she feels a sense of fulfillment by her success stories, when families who have adopted kittens send her texts and pictures of the cats growing up in their new homes.

When Smith sees those successes, it can turn an entire day around.

"On the days where I'm completely exhausted, if I'm able to win over that one kitten who's been really shy, then it's been worth it," she said.

Like David L. Dye on Facebook or email him at ddye@sharonherald.com.

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