A pregnant cat was taken into a shelter in California a week ago. Soon after her arrival, she went into labor and gave birth to a litter of kittens.
On the very same night, a Good Samaritan brought an orphaned bunny who desperately needed a mother’s love.
The shelter staff knew that the bunny might not make it through the night without a surrogate mom and decided to give him the best chance they could by introducing him to the cat mama and her newborn kittens.
The cat immediately accepted him and started nursing and cleaning him as her own. The shelter later contacted Love Your Feral Felines, a volunteer-based rescue group located in Oceanside/Vista, California, and asked them if they would be willing to take the feline family with the new addition.
“Of course we said, ‘Yes.’ Our transporter picked up the little family and fostered them overnight for us when the babies were only one day old,” Melissa Dunaj, Senior Director of Love Your Feral Felines, told Love Meow.
“She is a rockstar momma, nursing the bunny and stimulating him to go to the bathroom.”
They began researching on what they needed to do to properly care for the baby bunny. They consulted an expert and discovered that the bunny was not a domestic rabbit, but a wild one.
“Since California has strict laws on wildlife and we quickly learned that a cat’s milk isn’t enough to sustain a rabbit,” Melissa told Love Meow.
The bunny needed to be transferred to a rescue with more expertise on bunny rehabilitation, but with the cat mama’s help, the little guy bounced back from the brink and was ready to embark on his next journey in life.
The rescue group transferred the bunny to a wildlife rescue with resources necessary to handle feeding and rehabilitating the bunny.
“The mom and kittens are being well cared for in a foster home in San Diego county. The kittens are one week old today. They will be available for adoption in about eight weeks.
“The bunny is doing very well and is being cared for by a trained wildlife rehabilitator,” Melissa told Love Meow.
