This morning FarmDog started barking like a bird had landed on her head and was trying to ride her into battle. When I poked my head out the door to tell her to shut up, she looked at me, wagged all over, barked at the ground near a corner of the yard, and looked back at me and wagged again.
Clearly, Timmy was down the well again.
So I went over to see what on earth she was going on about. And saw a pair of kittens.
So I go outside the yard to get a better look at them and see how likely it is that their mother will be coming back by to pick them up later (usually very likely,) and realized that they clearly had eye infections.
Being dry and dusty here it's pretty common for feral kittens to come up with minor eye infections, they generally get over them and all is well. The problem with these two was that their eyes were goobered shut.
And they were skinny.
Also my dog was whining and reaching a paw through the fence to paw near one of them as if to say "They're right there. They're babies. Alone. Damnit do something!"
Anyway. Babies. Needed help. Need I elaborate on what happened?
It took me ten minutes to get one of em's eyes cleaned up enough to open, and it demonstrated the bad side of eye infections in feral kittens.
See, usually the momma cat cleans their faces so the eyes don't get stuck shut. If they do, though, all that infection has nowhere to go, and builds up behind the eyelids. So when you do start getting things cleaned up a bit, you get... ooze. In a best case scenario. In a worst case scenario there's a good amount of pressure built up and there's squirting.
We'll see how they do. One of them is a little worrying, but I'm not going to make a bet either way yet. I'll do everything I can and see what happens.
But something really needs to be done about the sucker tattoo on my forehead if the dog is reading it now...
