Megacoons

Now that Max is settled with my brother, I have no kitties. I have learned things from Max, though.

1) My house is boring and lonely. Therefore, if there is to be kitty, there must be two kitties.
2) I'm a hard person to get used to when you're already set in your ways and thinking humans come in this style. (You know, it's downright irritating to realize that what holds true for other humans relating to me also holds true for cats!) Anyway, therefore, if there is to be kitties, there must be kittens first who grow up with me around so they're used to me and my behavioral quirks.
3) Just any cat won't do: I need cats who are gentle, and predisposed to like being around humans, and are rather lazy and content (when they're grown, anyway). Cats who are well socialized and don't have dark patches in their personalities where someone when they were little was mean to them or scared them.

Which means, to me, Maine Coon kitties!

One Sunday recently I drove 4 hours to a place called Megacoons (you can look it up on the web if you want) that makes Maine Coon kittens on purpose. The man who runs the place has been doing it for twenty years. He's now retired and this is his whole life (well, he does have a girlfriend who was there when I got there, so I suppose he does things other than take care of the cats, but he spends most of his time with them.)

He is very passionate about the breed and making them better, both healthier and in appearance. They're already sweeties in personality. He was showing me something about the coloration on a very young kitten. These kittens were just old enough to have eyes open and ears up, but not old enough to be able to retract claws yet.

I always thought kittens were kind of fragile. He's treating this kitten like he's playing with a slinky. He's trying to show me a tummy color detail. The kitten isn't objecting, but it's small in his big hands and squirmy simply because it's a kitten, so the kitten keeps pouring from one hand to the other. Like a slinky. I have no idea what he was actually telling me. My brain just fixated on this kitten handling. I mean, wow. Talk about yes, your kitten will be handled and socialized to humans from a very young age!

Pippin was a CFA Maine Coon.
Note the sweet, elegant lines (amid the fur)

Also, I discovered that my sweet Pippin was a CFA registry Maine Coon. The registry is who holds the cat shows and who determines what physical traits make a show-winning cat. CFA Maine Coons are more elegant and slender. These Maine Coons are TICA registry. They look like small bobcats. They have massive bone structure and look wild.

They're sweet natured, though. The wild look is all on the surface. In an enclosure with two mommies and their kittens, because they'd been born so close together that he raised them all together (this is what cats do when they're feral - they all babysit the kittens) one of the mommies, named Layla, introduced herself to my lap without me doing anything and promptly curled up on it. She was big, and kept dripping off the edges of my lap and, like I always had to do with Pippin, I kept having to move bits of her back up onto my lap. And like Pippin, she didn't mind. Seemed to think it was part of my job as a sitting-down-human.

Mommy needs time out from the kittens!

Johnnie (the Megacoons guy) sat down on the floor and started luring kittens out with a felt strand toy (like a feather wand). And kittens kept emerging. It was their nap time -- they weren't afraid of us or anything. They were just all asleep when we first showed up. More kittens kept emerging. They were all colors, seemingly. You see the mommy cat on my lap is a tri-color tortoiseshell cat, so she can give three different colors to her kittens. Johnnie says that he has difficulty producing all black cats with the assortment he has, but there's one in here somewhere. He finally locates a cute little black tuxedo kitten and holds it up to demonstrate.

I envy men their big hands. I would have had to use two hands to pick up the kitten (these were about 8-10 weeks old) simply because my hand couldn't span its back successfully. Johnnie just picks up the kitten with one hand without even thinking about it. 

Kittens keep appearing. Finally I asked in amazement, "Just how many are there?!" He shrugs and says "Ten. Five from each mommy." Wow. No wonder the mommies wanted some adult human time! (The other mommy was asleep on top of a carrying crate that was in there probably to get the kittens used to the concept.)

Of course, the kittens were fascinated with my shoelaces. I made the mistake of picking one up that was particularly into trying to get them loose. He was a little red classic tabby who looked exactly like Pippin did when he was a kitten. (The visible structural differences between registries' Maine Coon types come later.) I held it together until about an hour down the road coming back home, and then fell apart.

Hopefully I will be ready for kittens in the four months that it will take, minimum, to make me some. (All the kittens I saw there were already spoken for.) But if I'm not ready in four months, I can wait. Johnnie was very adamant that no one ever has to take a kitten they aren't perfectly happy with.

I would have taken more pictures but it was all a bit overwhelming. There were a lot of cats in a small space (so it seemed to me). He had a room that was closed off that was storage. He said it was supposed to be a birthing room but the mommies didn't like being separated from the other cats. They are separated, but it's just wire and they can see, smell, and hear each other.

And obviously the cats prefer it that way.