Teri Vance: BeBe Braveheart lives up to her name

A little more than a month ago, I wrote about a kitten found in Dayton that had been shot several times with a BB gun and left for dead.

She was just three weeks old when someone found her and brought her into Catmandu, the cat sanctuary in Carson City. She was named BeBe Braveheart and placed in a foster home, where she was being cared for. However, her chances of survival remained in question because of the severity of her injuries and her young age.

I spoke with Linda Buchanan, founder of Catmandu, this week and she had some really great news.

BeBe Braveheart has continued to increase in strength, and was placed with a surrogate mama cat whose litter of kittens is a couple of weeks younger than BeBe.

“She’s doing great,” Buchanan said. “She gets right in there. She’s nursing and playing and loving life. She’s just one of the litter.”

She still carries the markings of her past, missing a piece of one ear and some black spots as a result of the scarring from the BBs. Her temperament, however, shows no signs of her mistreatment.

“She’s just a sweetheart, loving as can be,” Buchanan said.

While several people have offered to permanently adopt the gray kitten, Buchanan said the kitten’s foster mom has decided to keep her.

“They couldn’t bear to let her go,” Buchanan explained.

If you really wanted a kitten, though, don’t despair. Catmandu is receiving its second wave of kittens in need of new homes.

In her four years of running Catmandu, this is the worst she’s seen for sheer number of kittens and the shape in which they’ve been found.

“We think it might be because of the hard winter and the cats were malnourished,” Buchanan speculated.

When I spoke to her Friday, she was at the veterinarian with three kittens suffering from what’s commonly known as Wobbly Kitty Syndrome. Wobbly cats have cerebellar hypoplasia, where the cerebellum of the brain hasn’t fully formed. It gives the cats an unsteady or wobbly gait.

They’re one of several kittens who will need to find homes.

“If anyone would like to adopt or foster or volunteer, that would be wonderful,” Buchanan said.

For information, go to www.catmanducc.org or call 775-297-3419.

•••

Speaking of animals, my sister and her family are out of town this week, leaving me to take care of their 2-and-a-half-year-old boxer, Sadie. By nature, boxers are chasers of wild game, which means they spend a good deal of time jumping and running around.

Normally, she lives in a spacious home on 10 acres, with five children to play with and two adults to take care of her.

Now, she’s in a small house with my husband, me and Roxy, our aging Rottweiler mix. I feel like I’ve taken on triplet toddlers. She’s up and she’s down, she cries for attention.

Roxy splits her time between guarding her food and glaring at Sadie for breaking the rules by climbing on the couch, not to mention tables and chairs, beds, dressers …

There’s no reason to share this except to get a little sympathy. Dog sitting is hard.

Teri Vance is a journalist, freelance writer and native Nevadan. Contact her with column ideas at terivance@rocketmail.com.