New Year's Eve Kittens: Tuffy [3]

Will says: My wife and I volunteer for SPCALA here in Southern California. We are in our ninth year and have fostered more than 300 cats and kittens. We have turned spare bedrooms into kitten rooms and have had as many as 19 fosters in the house at one time. In addition to photographing our fosters, for the past several years I have been photographing most of the cats and kittens that come through our adoption center in Long Beach.

Tuffy was born about a week and a half before Christmas of 2006 at a construction site in Long Beach, CA. When the mother cat disappeared, construction workers tried bottle feeding Tuffy and his three siblings and then took them over to Long Beach Animal Care Services on Sunday, New Year's Eve. Long Beach Animal Control and SPCALA, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles, share the same facility with Long Beach Animal Control taking charge of animal control functions and SPCALA running the adoption facility. The kittens needed to be bottle fed and were given to SPCALA almost immediately. The afternoon is not an ideal time for bottle babies to be coming into the shelter because of the difficulty of finding someone to take care of them. My wife and I were volunteering at the shelter, and since we had the room available at home and were experienced foster parents, giving the kittens to us to foster was a no-brainer.

Tuffy and his siblings turned out to be among the most photogenic kittens that we ever had in foster care. Tuffy was a very normal kitten but he and the camera seemed to really hit it off. His facial expressions were his forte and hopefully you can see that in some of the photographs. He in particular would wrestle a lot with his sister Muffy, though Tuffy would often get the worst of it. I like to use a cat toy called a "cat dancer" to move the kittens around, get action out of them, and to get them to look toward the camera. Tuffy became bored with it very quickly but he seemed to always find new things to play with, even pieces of paper. Of course, to kittens, everything is a toy and they just have to figure out how to play with it. When he was ready, Tuffy was adopted to be a companion for another cat.