July 20th - What’s new pussycat?

Well they are, actually. The kittens, that is.

Despite having long announced our intention to leave Blighty on or around 1st June, our curiously hasty departure on 6th July still took everyone by surprise. Having mooched around for months waiting first for our Fulham house to sell and then, when it didn’t, putting it on the rental market, we suddenly upped and left town with barely enough time to arrange a leaving party. No, let’s be frank here, we didn’t have time to organise a party. Instead, we held an open house over the preceding weekend, during which we entertained guests in between buzzing around with the hoover and paint brush. How to win friends and influence people, not!

But meanwhile, over in France, two kittens needed to be collected before La Belle Famille F left for their annual junket to sunny Scarborough.

Tigger and Foggy probably probably arrived in this world around the middle of April. I say probably because no-one will ever know for sure. The kittens were born in Billy and MrsF’s roof, and the first they knew about them was when they started squeaking and scrabbling about above their bedroom … apart, of course, from the fact that the mother, who had for weeks resembled a sort of four-legged furry football, seemed to have been on a crash diet. From memory, kittens don’t do much for the first week or so, so they may have been 7-10 days old by this point.

Anyone who has tried recently to find a non-pedigree kitten in the UK will undoubtedly have been surprised to find how difficult it is these days. I know of one couple who travelled from London to the West Country to buy a common tabby for their daughter. Even most the motley feline cross-breed can now fetch a tidy sum, so successful have the animal charities been in their quest for sterilisation. And then we wonder why mice and other pests are on the increase.

In rural France, however, things are more old-fashioned. Most local papers carry a plethora of ads offering kittens ‘free to a good home’, placed by those too kind or too squeamish to drown their cat’s illegitimite off-spring in the nearest available bucket. With the new Passport for Pets Scheme allowing pets to travel between the UK and mainland Europe, you may be forgiven for thinking that you have hit upon a sure-fire business proposition. However, dear reader, before you rush off to the Dragons’ Den to seek financial backing for your new kitten import business, there is a catch …

Tigger and Foggy immediately settled in to the house in Montrejeau and started to make it their own. First victims were our bedraggled house plants, just starting to recover from being squashed during the hot journey down in the car. Next, the net curtains. Luckily, with shutters, we hardly need them anyway. Then our shoes - Foggy seems to have developed a slightly kinky penchant for sleeping with his head in John’s sandals - and our tall gothic dining chairs with the upholstered backrests, perfect for testing those sharp little claws.

Discovering a few flee-dirts, we bought a flee-comb and treated the kittens’ bedding (at 3 months they are too young to treat directly) and our other furnishings with Tiquanis, a foul-smelling aerosol pesticide. It sorted the flees out overnight, but fumigated the flat so effectively that we had to vacate the house. The next day we took them to our charming, English-speaking, vet for their first vaccinations.

Dr. Nivot asked us whether or not we intend to travel back to the UK with our cats. “Not this year”, I said, “but we may do next summer”. He then explained the process for getting a Pet Passport. Just as well, as it soon became obvious that one needs to think ahead, if one wants to take a pet abroad.

Simply speaking, the kittens need to be microchipped, vaccinated for rabies and treated for ticks. The vet gave the kittens the usual vaccinations against cat flu, leukaemia and the cat equivalent of parvo virus, etc., injected and checked their micro-chips and presented us with the Pet Passports. Since poor Tigger and Foggy were now feeling a little the worse for wear, having been thoroughly ‘chipped and pinned’, Nivot said he would do the rabies vaccine when we brought them back for their booster in a few weeks’ time.

But here’s the catch. Before the kittens can travel on their shiny new passports, six months must elapse from the date of a satisfactory bloodtest showing that they have developed sufficient anti-bodies to the rabies vaccine … and the blood test must be taken six months after the vaccination. One therefore has to start the vaccination process a full year before one wants to travel.

Back at home, Tigger and Foggy have discovered that, when it isn’t too hot to bother, the best place to learn about the ways of the world is from the (relative) safety of the second floor window sill.

This entry was posted on 20/07/2007 at 07:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print